Albeit unrelated, I wonder when Quakenet is going to realise that SSL for IRC, both server-to-server, but also client-to-server, is a must have in the year 2014, if you are truly care about your users privacy.
the other way to do it would be like freenode: do it quickly without understanding the risks... they used the same SSL cert for every ircd, then they got hacked, and with no PFS, all their past SSL'ed IRC is now effectively in the clear.
we are now actively working on the problem for server links, but ultimately believe that having ssl for client connections at this moment in time adds little value: https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive...
This is essentially the line of reasoning I'm seeing employed in this blog post.
SSL is valuable on IRC solely for letting you authorize with NickServ. If you are at a developer conference on the conference wifi, you would be foolish to connect to IRC sans-SSL and authorize with NickServ, especially if you owned any channels. If you blindly accept an unverified cert, that's your problem, but don't take SSL away from me because some people don't understand certificates.
I break into any discussion I see on IRC where someone posts a link to this article as an argument against SSL on IRC simply because it's not an argument against SSL.
Of course, it takes two to tango. We, the client authors, have started enhancing our SSL support and so should the network operators that hosts the servers on the larger networks.
Also, I think we agree on how Freenode stores the same certificate on every sever is... not ideal...
I'd love to be able to connect to a QuakeNet IRC server which is SSL/TLS protected to help guard against anyone sniffing on the local network, or along the route to the specific IRC server.
Yes, there are problems to solve. Clients need to validate the servers certificate properly. Users need to understand that whatever they send may still be logged by the network, other users on the channel, etc.
Saying that IRC doesn't need SSL is like saying that other IM applications such as Skype don't need it either. Anything which helps prevent eavesdropping should be done.
At the very least, SSL helps protects a user's credentials when using such services.
I'm not saying that a network should require all of its users to use SSL, but I do think that it's should be up to the user to decide whether or not her or they wants to encrypt the connection between themselves and the IRC server and let it be up to the channel operator to decide whether or not she's willing to accept clients, that connect over insecure connections, in her channel.
It's purely because it hasn't been prioritised until recently, but it sounds like it's getting some attention now :-)
Also, the DANE support in Irssi was announced in September last year and I have only heard of one network where some of its servers have adopted to this technology. Even though there is only one client that currently supports DANE+DNSSEC verification, we still need the (big) networks to start preparing for the support of it, and help us reaching the point where we can secure our user connections even better :-)
Having SSL on IRC, even without DANE+DNSSEC, is still better than having no SSL at all.
I tried running a silc server alongside my ircd for a while, but it never even reached a weeks worth of uptime without crashing (no matter if debian package, self compiled stable or devel, or some minor messing with the source).
Perhaps if a non-C/C++ implementation comes along..
What was missing, I think, was lack of client development and adoption. There was default CLI client which was a weird fork of Irssi, then there was plugin for Irssi, and not much else.
There were of course few small client projects, but few of them got past early alpha stage.