IRC From The Other Side

Lecture by Alexander Færøy, and Markus Viitamäki at DreamHack Winter in Jönköping, Sweden on November 30, 2013.

In this lecture, we spoke about the operations side of running Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks. We went over the topologies for typical IRC networks, and how one could compare an IRC network to a modern web application such as Facebook.

We also went over some of the theory behind the problems that IRC servers must be able to handle, such as network partitioning during a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Finally, we gave some hints on how to preserve some privacy when using IRC, by using software such as Tor and remembering to enable TLS when connecting to IRC servers.

Files