Stuntour

From BovineNet

1 StunTour: SSL Enabler for mIRC
2 End of development
3 Downloads
4 External links

[edit] StunTour: SSL Enabler for mIRC

Being able to connect securely to SSL-enabled IRC chat servers is something that remains difficult for most Win32 IRC applications. Very few IRC clients natively support connecting to servers with SSL, and the few that do are generally of very poor quality.

Prior to the time that the popular Win32 mIRC client natively supported SSL, if you wanted to communicate securely then you had to resort to running a separate tunneling application (such as stunnel) and then make mIRC to connect to a port bound to a localhost listening socket. This had the added overhead of requiring another application to be running at all times, and this made it difficult to change what server you connect to since you must manipulate the destination of the tunnel application. Also, running an external program is inconvenient and prone to problems.

After growing tired of fighting with stunnel and port mappings, I decided to write a mIRC plugin DLL that would natively allow it to connect to SSL-enabled IRC servers. StunTour is a utility that automatically intercepts connections with destination port of 994. This allows you to connect to IRC servers using a secure SSL connection (provided that the server supports connecting over SSL on port 994). StunTour also allows a few other common server ports to be used as well.

[edit] End of development

Since mIRC now natively supports SSL connections (provided that you separately download and install the correct OpenSSL libraries), I don't have any current plants to make future releases unless I get feedback from users saying that there's still interest in it. That said, the current version of StunTour can still be successfully used with current versions of mIRC (I've tested up to 6.17).

Regardless, StunTour is still a very interesting demonstration of what can be done using function intercepting and may be useful for any Windows developers interested in these software techniques. Windows API interception is a very powerful technique to customize and extend the functionality of other binary-only applications.