Introduction

DarkChannel is a open and free, crypto agnostic, secure, modern relay chat protocol.

DarkChannel tries to specify a modern, secure and trustworthy IRC-style protocol based on known secure building blocks without reinventing the wheel or trying to implement a new cryptographic system.

The DarkChannel reference implementation was written in Perl. This allowed for rapid application prototyping which helped the project to get forward with swift progress.

We are aware that Perl is a dynamic language, not really suited for security critical implementations. Our afinity to the lanuage helped the development and testing of the current reference implementation which in turn helped speed up the protocol specification.

Today's language of choice for a robust implementation of the DarkChannel protocol would be Rust or Go. We hope that we will be able to rewrite the implementations in one of these languages when the protocol specification has stabilized.