MapaDelSitio CambiosRecientes Noticias ÁreaElisp WikiCómo
Yemen, Día Nacional

ErcSSL

ERC is fully equipped to connect to SSL/TLS-enabled servers (e.g. OFTC and Freenode) however, Certificate Authentication support is rather untested.

For the purposes of this guide, head on over to the following OFTC page to get an idea on how to create the necessary certificates

Getting Started

Hack away at your init files, ensuring that SSL/TLS support is enabled:

 (require 'tls)

This allows us to set the tls-program variable that calls external tools “openssl” or “gnutls-cli” to perform the actual connection.

To see how the variable is initally defined:

 [F1] V tls-program

You’ll notice that there are several options for tls-program. tls-program will cycle through the commands until a connection is established with the fallback.

Please note that while you can add CA-chain & accompanying keys to gnutls-cli, ERC may fail to recognise them, and will proceed to create the secure connection using gnutls without certificate authentication.

It is this reason alone that I have opted for openssl:

 (setq tls-program '("openssl s_client -connect %h:%p -no_ssl2 -ign_eof
                                       -CAfile /home/ootput/.private/certs/CAs.pem 
                                       -cert /home/ootput/.private/certs/nick.pem" 
                     "gnutls-cli --priority secure256 
                                 --x509cafile /home/ootput/.private/certs/CAs.pem 
                                 --x509certfile /home/ootput/.private/certs/nick.pem -p %p %h" 
                     "gnutls-cli --priority secure256 -p %p %h"))

Please note that your distro’s implementation of libgnutls may be unsuitable for CA-chaining, as was my case.

Use of gnutls-cli is recommended in the future, however, as most linux projects have sought to replace openssl dependencies with gnutls

Now, assuming you’ve already enabled ‘erc, we can continue to work with the supplied erc-tls command:

 ; M-x start-irc
 (defun start-irc ()
   "Connect to IRC."
   (interactive)
   (erc-tls :server "irc.oftc.net" :port 6697
        :nick "ootput" :full-name "ootput")
   (erc :server "irc.freenode.net" :port 6667
        :nick "ootput" :full-name "ootput")
   (setq erc-autojoin-channels-alist '(("freenode.net" "#emacs" "#screen" "#ion")
                                       ("oftc.net" "#debian"))))

This will establish connection to OFTC on port 6697 (SSL), but more importantly, it will allow us to use certificates for transparent Nickserv auth.

Enjoy your SSL-encrypted IRC session!

Problems

Re-connect

While the start-irc will initiate the cert-based ssl connection, a terminated connection will fail to trigger an auto-reconnect with certs. In the absence of valid ssl credentials, this will mean repeated failed attempts to reconnect. A temporary solution would be to have nickserv login and password saved to an erc-auth file to be loaded by erc. – ootput

Yeah, that's an issue indeed. As a temporary hotfix I set erc-server-auto-reconnect to nil

Symbol's function definition is void: erc-tls

Hey, put (require ‘erc) in your ~/.emacs. – talau

I followed the tutorial on creating the cert keys and I have Nick.cer, Nick.key and Nick.pem. When I go to configure the tls-program variable, the -CAfile option requires CAs.pem. This tutorial doesn’t explain where to get this file from. – E1f

You skipped a part of the tutorial, E1f. Check under “Connecting to OFTC with your Cert” → “Unlisted Clients” → “Irssi”, and adjust for your designated paths. – ootput


ERC