Bare Chat

Introduction

This is a simple command-line based peer-to-peer (P2P) chat service written in C.

Prerequisites

Before you can compile and run the P2P chat service, ensure you atleast have the following prerequisites installed on your system:

• C Compiler (e.g., gcc)
• OpenSSL
• Make
• Readline

Note that you will also need to host the server on a machine that is accessible to all clients. This can be done by hosting the server on a public IP address or otherwise if you are technically inclined. This is because the p2p chat is based on all clients joining a server and finding eachother from there. (Kinda ass I know but it's not finished and privacy will be improved).

Compilation

To compile the server, use the following command:

make server

To compile the client, use the following command:

make client

Configuration

To use the server or client, there is a .env.example file. Here you can define how many threads you want to use etc. You will also need to configure the server port here and I'm thinking it might be a good idea to move the SERVER_KEY here in the future, I just need to be bothered...

Usage

Server

The server component is responsible for allowing discovery of eachothers ip-addresses and ports, to run the server simply write:

./server

When the server is running it should log all incoming messages and log info accordingly.

Client

The client component allows users to connect to the P2P chat network and communicate with other clients. To use the client you will first need to generate RSA keys, execute the following command:

openssl genpkey -algorithm RSA -out private_key.pem -aes256 -aes256
openssl rsa -pubout -in private_key.pem -out public_key.pem

Then you will need to define the location of these keys in the .env file, check the .env.example if unsure. Once you have done this, you can run the client:

./client

Once you have the client up and running, you will see a menu of commands. The thought is to do the following, although I have no checks so if you don't I don't really know what happens hehehe...

# Set username
setname <username>

# Connect to the server
join <ip:port>

# Get list of users on the server
info

# Get list of users you are connected to
list

# Connect to a user (you can send a message without connecting, but connect basically adds them to your address book)
connect <ip:port>

# Send a message to a user
msg <ip:port> <message>

# Or if you have connected to a user, you can just do
msg <username> <message>

# Disconnect from a user
disconnect <ip:port>

# Leave the server
leave

# Exit the client
quit

Security

All communication is end-to-end encrypted and is implemented as follows:

• Requester sends their public key to receiver
• Receiver generates a random AES key and encrypts it with the requesters public key
• Receiver sends the encrypted AES key to the requester
• Requester decrypts the AES key with their private key
• All further communication is now encrypted with AES

Contributing

My code in this project is shit and it's probably a project I'll never fully finish. If you dare look at the spaghetti barf excuse I have called "code", please make changes and I will review them.

License

This project is licensed under the GPL-3 License - see the LICENSE file for details