sshchat | chat over SSH

Dead simple secure chat system over SSH, implemented with libssh

How does it work?

Users connect to a custom SSH server using a custom SSH client. Server and the client then creates a communication channel, which the client uses to send commands to the server, and the server sends the messages that the client should display.

The "protocol" is explained with more details in the protocol documentation.

Features

• Performance: Server and the client uses a multi-threaded architecture.
• Configuration: You can configure every aspect of your server - SSH keys, MOTD, password protection etc.
• Administration: You can authenticate as an admin to kick, nick ban and IP ban other users.

Installation

Client

• Install the dependencies: You will need a compiler (idealy gcc), make, libssh, ncurses and headers (libssh-dev, ncurses-dev)
• Download the source code: Visit the releases tab and download the latest archive
• Extract and compile: Extract the archive, change directory into the client directory and run make
• Install the binary: Install the binary by running make install as root (or use sudo)

After the installation, you can run the client with the sshchat command.

You can display the avaliable commands by running .help after connecting to a server.

Server

• Install the dependencies: You will need a compiler (idealy gcc), make, openssh, libssh, libinih and headers (libssh-dev, libinih-dev)
• Download the source code: Visit the releases tab and download the latest archive
• Extract and compile: Extract the archive, change directory into the server directory and run make
• Generate your keys: Generate a pair of SSH keys for the server by running make keygen
• Install the binary: Install the binary and the default configuration by running make install as root (or use sudo)

After the installation, you can run the server with the sshchat-server command.

The default server configuration which is located at /etc/sshchat/config.ini, has comments exaplaining every option.

Contributing

If you want to contribute, feel free to do so! For example, you can start by adding a new command. When you are done, please make sure to format the code with clang-format:

make format