BitchX

Infobox_Software
name = BitchX



caption =
developer = Colten Edwards (panasync)
latest_release_version = 1.1-final
latest_release_date = March 26, 2004
operating_system =
genre = IRC client
license = Revised BSD license
website = http://www.bitchx.org

BitchX is a free IRC client. The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a script for the IrcII chat client. It was converted to a program on its own right by panasync (Colten Edwards). BitchX 1.1 final was released in 2004. It is written in C, and is a console application. A graphical interface is also available, which uses the GTK+ toolkit. It works on most Unix-like operating systems, and is distributed under a BSD license. It is originally based on ircII-EPIC and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports IPv6 [cite book |title=IPv6: Theory, Protocol, and Practice |author=Peter Loshin |year=2004 |publisher=Morgan Kaufmann |page=p. 316 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=_6dlixBQyP4C&pg=PA316&dq=BitchX&ei=0BfTR_erNJKetAOgpoilBQ&sig=Q_QSMx-iTakq8bWtuNlAqKpV7Zk] , multiple servers and SSL, but not UTF-8. BitchX (often called just "BX" by fans) is well known for its unique default of sending random messages on a /quit.

BitchX is the current project. While there is no current release to the public on the new code base, the project is leaning towards merging back to the current base version of Epic.

Security

It was known that early versions of BitchX were vulnerable to a denial of service attack in that they could be caused to crash by passing specially-crafted strings as arguments to certain IRC commands. This was before format string attacks became a well-known class of vulnerability. [cite book |title=Hack Proofing Your Network |author=Ryan Russell |year=2002 |publisher=Syngress |page=p. 329 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=v8bp4mvpYc4C&pg=RA2-PA329&dq=BitchX&lr=&ei=9xTTR7DdEIWusgP2y8ykBQ&sig=OsfVrtGM6NSjSACXwjNCrJlcayA]

The current version of BitchX, released in 2004, has security problems allowing remote IRC servers to execute arbitrary code on the client's machine ( [http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2007-3360 CVE-2007-336] , [http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2007-4584 CVE-2007-4584] ).

See also

*Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients

External links

* [http://www.bitchx.org/ BitchX website]
* [http://freshmeat.net/projects/bitchx/ Freshmeat project page]

References