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Posted By: moonmoon /challenge or additional crypto identifiers - 18/07/22 04:28 PM
I'm looking into how to make the /CHALLENGE command work in mIRC, and while it'd be neat if it was just directly supported, it's such a niche feature that I won't hold my breath. /CHALLENGE is a means of obtaining IRC operator status on a handful of networks that uses an RSA key-based challenge/response method instead of a typical /OPER password. I'll detail the exact protocol below:

  1. The client issues /CHALLENGE opername to the server
  2. The server responds with one or more lines of the 740 numeric (which contains the base64-encoded challenge text), for example :irc.example.com 740 opername :Abd84Dd0d8s14dddd98492
  3. The server sends a 741 numeric to indicate that it is done sending base64-encoded challenge text
  4. The client takes the base64-encoded challenge text from all of the 740 lines, combines them together, and then base64-decodes them to obtain the encrypted challenge
  5. The client decrypts the encrypted challenge using its RSA private key and PKCS#1 OAEP padding to obtain the decrypted challenge
  6. The client hashes the decrypted challenge using SHA-1 and base64-encodes the binary result of that hash to obtain the encodedHash
  7. The client responds to the server with /CHALLENGE +encodedHash (note the leading + character)


If an error occurs somewhere in the process, either a 464 or 491 numeric will be issued.

Supporting this command natively poses a handful of challenges regarding the generation and storage of the RSA keys, however this would be achievable in mIRC scripting if it supported the following additional identifiers (which should be a lot easier to support as they can be effectively wrappers around functions present in OpenSSL):
  • Open a potentially password-protected RSA key and store it for later use--this could read directly from the file the key is stored in, or it could be passed a string that was obtained via successive calls to $read()
  • RSA decryption
  • PKCS#1 OAEP padding removal
  • base64 encoding/decoding
Do you have an example of a network where this is used?
Also, I'm curious what advantage this would have over simply using the fact that you've logged into their server via SASL External. Instead of doing a challenge, the server could instead give oper to a login that has been verified by the SASL handshake as being in possession of the the private key matching the certificate that's recognized as being the oper.
Used on Libera. SASL EXTERNAL is for logging onto a NickServ account, /challenge is for becoming an oper -- two completely separate things. While what you describe could potentially happen, nothing like that currently exists in server-side code and I highly doubt there would be much of an appetite between the rest of the staff to completely change how we oper up.
Solanum (Libera.Chat) has it.

https://github.com/solanum-ircd/sol...278ab6027707b/doc/features/challenge.txt
When I asked my question, it was with the intent of testing this, but now I realize without seeing a packet challenge and the private key that's supposed to respond to it, that I can't test this, and can't do that without being oper whereever
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