How to securely chat over SSH? In this post I discuss one of the latest solutions I've discovered - A very nice piece of software: ssh-chat.
For a long time I've been using and maintaining an active "talk" client/server on one of my systems in order to be able to communicate and collaborate securely over SSH with whoever I needed to.
Unfortunately this is not a perfect solution for many reasons. I've been thinking of setting up a local IRC server but there are weaknesses with that as well.
Recently I found an interesting project on github, created by a very ingenious programmer who goes by the alias of shazow. His project, written in Go: ssh-chat.
https://github.com/shazow/ssh-chat
It uses the go libraries for most of the SSH client/server code, but it adds a custom terminal which has a similar look and feel as IRC.
It's very well written and requires very little work to get it up and running. The only thing I did was install it on a small KVM server and got it to start up automatically.
Here is the systemd file I created for it, located at:
/etc/systemd/system/ssh-chat.service
Content:
[Unit]
Description=SSH-CHAT service
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=//ssh-chat/ssh-chat -i //.ssh/id_rsa
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
A couple of issues with this solution:
1) While it is an interesting idea, I need to keep an eye out on the golang SSH client/server libraries to make sure security vulnerabilities are kept at bay.
2) Keep in mind that like 'talk,' the conversations on the local server are not necessarily encrypted and could potentially be captured if the server is compromised.
Apart from these reservations, I really like this client and will look into it further as a potential solution.
For a long time I've been using and maintaining an active "talk" client/server on one of my systems in order to be able to communicate and collaborate securely over SSH with whoever I needed to.
Unfortunately this is not a perfect solution for many reasons. I've been thinking of setting up a local IRC server but there are weaknesses with that as well.
Recently I found an interesting project on github, created by a very ingenious programmer who goes by the alias of shazow. His project, written in Go: ssh-chat.
https://github.com/shazow/ssh-chat
It uses the go libraries for most of the SSH client/server code, but it adds a custom terminal which has a similar look and feel as IRC.
It's very well written and requires very little work to get it up and running. The only thing I did was install it on a small KVM server and got it to start up automatically.
Here is the systemd file I created for it, located at:
/etc/systemd/system/ssh-chat.service
Content:
[Unit]
Description=SSH-CHAT service
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
A couple of issues with this solution:
1) While it is an interesting idea, I need to keep an eye out on the golang SSH client/server libraries to make sure security vulnerabilities are kept at bay.
2) Keep in mind that like 'talk,' the conversations on the local server are not necessarily encrypted and could potentially be captured if the server is compromised.
Apart from these reservations, I really like this client and will look into it further as a potential solution.
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