| BitchX | |
| Developer: | Colten Edwards (panasync) and Kevin Easton (caf) |
| Operating System: | Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Windows, OS X |
| Programming Language: | C |
| Genre: | IRC client |
| License: | BSD-3-Clause GNU General Public License |
BitchX is a free IRC client[1] that has been regarded as the most popular ircII-based IRC client.[2] The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a script for the IrcII chat client. It was converted to a program in its own right by panasync (Colten Edwards). BitchX 1.1 final was released in 2004. It is written in C and is a TUI application utilizing ncurses. GTK+ toolkit support has been dropped. It works on all Unix-like operating systems, and is distributed under a BSD license. It was originally based on ircII-EPIC, and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports IPv6,[3] multiple servers and SSL, and a subset of UTF-8 (characters contained in ISO-8859-1) with an unofficial patch.[4]
On several occasions, BitchX has been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems.[1] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
The latest official release is version 1.2.
BitchX does not yet support Unicode.[10]
It was known that early versions of BitchX were vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack in that they could be caused to crash by passing specially-crafted strings as arguments to certain IRC commands. This was before format string attacks became a well-known class of vulnerability.[11]
The previous version of BitchX, released in 2004, has security problems allowing remote IRC servers to execute arbitrary code on the client's machine (CVE-2007-3360, CVE-2007-4584).
On April 26, 2009, Slackware removed BitchX from its distribution, citing the numerous unresolved security issues.[12]
The aforementioned vulnerabilities were fixed in the sources for the 1.2 release.[13] [14] [15]