Episode: 19
Title: HPR0019: SILC
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0019/hpr0019.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:19:54

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Now what's we gonna do?
I'm going to talk about secure internet live conferencing and Wikipedia defines silk as
silk is a network protocol which provides secure synchronous conferencing services over
the internet.
If it puts simply, it's basically equated to a very, very securely implemented version
of IRC and it also includes a lot of the features of jabber and instant messenger.
As all the regular stuff like group chat and instant messages and file transfers but it
also has extras like audio and video streaming, silk server networking and complete encryption
of all communications.
And silk is entirely impossible to send plain text around encrypted messages.
What this means is that server to server, client to server and client to client communications
are all encrypted with the logarithm that is offered by the server that they are on and
the encryption keys that are pre-generated by the clients and the server administrators.
It is entirely impossible to turn off the security features of silk and it is entirely
impossible to connect with that encryption key or even start your server without an encryption key.
In silk, there is a network topology that is basically like this. If you install your own
silk server, you need to first create what they call a silk router and under that you create your
server. And what the router does is it allows other silk servers to route their traffic to your server.
And all those external silk servers are connected to their own silk routers that are
connected to other servers and then on and then on. And if you wanted to, you could probably connect
every silk server on the internet to one giant network. And the benefit of this network
topology is that you can increase the amount of communications being sent and you will not lose
scalability or bog down any specific single server. And this decentralizes the entire network.
And if one server goes down, you can still connect to another server provided that is actually
being routed to by another server. So you're providing security over the silk protocol as well
as a security of actually where each server actually is. So I've been running my own silk server
in standalone mode for the past three weeks. And it uses less system resources in IRC or
Java servers. But I don't like it that there aren't any chat services like the ones used in IRC.
The other thing I notice is that silk does not have a lot of different clients available.
But if you're using a GUI, you can use Pigeon and the silk plugin that is available. And the
silk project offers a command line client that is officially supported. And it's basically just
IRC plus the silk plugin. Both of them work flawlessly. Aside from the clients and the silk
server itself, there is also a toolkit available that you can download and program anything
you can think of that will interface with the silk protocol. You can program for your silk client
or a plugin or you can program more functionality into the silk server. You can program network
services and server services. You just have to know a little bit of seed programming and how to
use a compiler. The silk toolkit is a software development toolkit and it provides full protocol
implementation for application developers to make new silk clients. It allows people to integrate
their own services into their own silk servers or provide a API to program
more functionality into their own silk clients that are already made and released.
So what they can do is create more plugins like the one for Pigeon but with more functionality.
The silk toolkit can be used for the GUI and for the command line and it supports multi-threaded
applications. It's pretty much very useful especially since there's not many services available
for silk servers. I'm using it to make a bot which also has a lot of functionality that is
provided as is in IRC for channel services and such and it's going to help to manage my own server.
If you're interested in finding out more about silk you can go to the silknet.org website which
is a silk project site and you can download their client or the Pigeon plugin. You can also download
the server source and the toolkit source. You can check out what servers are available to connect
to on the silk network. There's an entire community and the thing that I like the most was that they
had quite a bit of documentation on software manuals, white papers, specifications, all the protocol
and if you have any other questions you can check their frequently asked questions on the silk
net.org site. If you'd like to play with silk but you don't really want to connect to one of
the official servers you can check out the link to my website in the show notes and connect to my
silk server. There's probably nobody on it but you can still check out silk and if you want to
read out more about what silk is there's a Wikipedia entry put into the show notes as well
and that's pretty much all I got. Thanks.