UnrealIRCd is an open-source

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...

daemon Daimon or Daemon (Ancient Greek: , "god", "godlike", "power", "fate") originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and Hell ...

, originally based on DreamForge, and is available for Unix-like operating systems and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

. Since the beginning of development on UnrealIRCd c. May 1999, many new features have been added and modified, including advanced security features and bug fixes, and it has become a popular server.

Development

UnrealIRCd was originally based on DALnet's DreamForge IRCd, "a now deprecated IRC server that was the predecessor to the actively maintained '' Bahamut'' server." On July 13, 2007, Carsten V. Munk (stskeeps), the founder of the UnrealIRCd project, announced that a future v4.0 would be a fork of InspIRCd. Later on, this idea was dropped. With the release of version 3.2.10 in December 2012, Bram Matthys (Syzop), the current project leader of UnrealIRCd, announced that development has been started on a 3.4 version. The 3.2 series will be maintained until the new version has been declared stable, which was expected to happen somewhere in 2014. In October 2015 it was announced that due to the many changes the new series will be called UnrealIRCd 4 and the first Release Candidate was made available for download. An UnrealIRCd 4.0.0 stable release was made on December 24, 2015. Next UnrealIRCd 5 stable series was first released on December 13, 2019.

Features

Some of Unreal's features are referred to as "nonstandard", in that they are not listed in the IRC-related RFCs 1459 and 2811–2813, but are beneficial "from a security point of view." The software "possibly has the most security features of any IRC server", including "spam filters, different styles of user bans, various channel modes to prevent abuse and flooding, SSL (

Secure Sockets Layer Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...

) connection support, and compressed server connections." For example, the ''shun'' command blocks a user from transmitting any text, the ''spamfilter'' uses

regular expressions A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" o ...

and can automatically ban, shun or disconnect users, and ''dccdeny'' can block files from being transmitted. It includes the ability to password-protect server restart and stop commands, for operator use only. The Windows version includes error reporting on startup. Unreal supports linking to IRC Services, and allowing Services to change channel modes. Server-side filtering can be used by administrators to block transfers of files, or certain domains. Unreal 3.2's "new-style" configuration file format is described as "more verbose" than traditional IRCd servers, which makes it easier set up; it is divided into "blocks" of related options, and has explanatory comments for each option.

Reception

UnrealIRCd is "one of the most popular and full-featured IRC daemons" and is used on the largest number of IRC servers, according to SearchIRC.com. This server is described as having "possibly the most security features of any IRC server."

Security issues

The tarball of version 3.2.8.1, from November 2009 to June 12, 2010, contained a

trojan Trojan or Trojans may refer to: * Of or from the ancient city of Troy * Trojan language, the language of the historical Trojans Arts and entertainment Music * ''Les Troyens'' ('The Trojans'), an opera by Berlioz, premiered part 1863, part 189 ...

that allowed people to execute commands with the privileges of the user running the

, regardless of any user restrictions. The problem was fixed - the current tarball download is not suspected to contain a trojan. The "Firefox XPS" cross-protocol JavaScript-based attack on IRC networks was reported in January 2010; UnrealIRCd developers later released a patch to set its anti-spoofing configuration parameter to "on" - the default was previously "off" - and "kill/zline/etc such connections". It is the first question in the configuration file.

References

External links