weecrypt

asymmetric encryption for weechat using gpg

weecrypt is a plugin for the weechat IRC client that encrypts your communication via GPG.

Table of contents

• Installation
• Setting it up
• Messages that are not encrypted
• Known Issues

Installation

To install it, run these commands in your shell:

git clone https://github.com/shak-mar/weecrypt.git
mkdir -p ~/.weechat/python/autoload/
cd ~/.weechat/python/autoload/
ln -s ~/weecrypt/weecrypt.py weecrypt.py

If your weechat is already running, you'll have reload your python plugins:

/python reload

Setting it up

Note: This guide assumes you already have a working GPG setup. If you dont't, you'll have to set it up first.

After installing weecrypt there is a little bit of configuration that needs to be done. The configuration is read from a JSON-encoded file at ~/.weecrypt.json:

{
    "gpg_identifiers": {
        "irc_nick": "key identifier"
    },
    "channels": ["#yourchannel"]
}

The gpg_identifiers option

gpg_identifiers is a dict mapping IRC nicknames to GPG key identifiers. A key identifier is something unique to the key, such as an email, name or ID.

This is necessary because weecrypt needs to know who to encrypt your message for. Conversly, only the people in the dictionary will receive encrypted messages.

Note: It might be a good idea to put variations of the nicknames, such as nickname1 or nickname_, in there as well, as clients will use those when reconnecting while having connection troubles.

The channels option

Only traffic on whitelisted channels and private messages to nicknames in the gpg_identifiers dict will be encrypted.

This is useful because you won't be able to convince all of your friends to use encryption or you might want to use big public channels.

Disabling logging in weechat

Unfortunately, because of the way weecrypt is implemented, the logger will log all communications after they were decrypted, you therefore have to disable logging at the very least for the channels and users in question.

weechat's logging options can be found under ~/.weechat/logger.conf.

To simply disable all logging, modify the auto_log option:

auto_log = off

To disable loggin for a specific channel or user set its loglevel to zero. For example:

[level]
irc.freenode.#yourchannel = 0
irc.freenode.yourfriend = 0

Messages that are not encrypted

When you receive a message that is not encrypted in a whitelisted channel, it will be prefixed with <unencrypted>: . If you want to write an unencrypted message yourself, you can use the /unencrypted command.

Note: Also, if you write a message that starts with <unencrypted>: , it will not be encrypted in order to avoid confusion between encrypted and raw messages.

Decryption failure

When you leave your computer running while you aren’t there, messages you receive won’t be decrypted correctly, because you aren’t there to enter your passphrase. In that case, the messages will be replaced with Decryption failed, try /weecrypt_retry.. As soon as you use the /weecrypt_retry command, you will be prompted for your passphrase by the gpg-agent again, and the decrypted message will be displayed to you in the server buffer.

Known Issues

There is a delay between you sending and your friends receiving the message

This is because ASCII armored GPG messages are quite big and IRC commands are limited in length. Therefore, weecrypt splits the message into smaller chunks and reassembles them on the other end. In order to avoid flooding, weechat waits a little between sending out commands. All this makes for a little slower communication speed, but you'll have to tolerate that in order to chat securely.

License

This is free software (as in freedom), using the permissive MIT (Expat) license. This means you can use, read the source code of, change and redistribute weecrypt.