ScatterChat a quick review
ScatterChat was released Saturday July 22, 2006 by the hacktivismo arm of the cult of the dead cow at the sixth hope. Simply speaking scatterchat is a branch or fork off of the Gaim instant messaging platform that promises high security though its use of TOR and through its use of hard encryption (ElGamal, AES) (More on the crypto here: http://scatterchat.com/docs/crypto_protocol.txt)To start I installed Scatterchat. I found the installer to be almost identical to gaim. Next I generated my encryption keys by following the prompts. Scatterchat then used the information already stored on my computer by gaim to automatically sign me in to all the IM networks that I had already been using.
At this point when I opened a new chat window I noticed a button similar in placement to the Gaim encryption plugin that indicated that my conversation was not secure. Chatting with some one else using scatterchat I would undoubtedly be able to carry on a fully encrypted conversation.
To use Tor I found that I had so sign completely off the IM network, at the login screen, under crypto setup, under options, are the options to configure the built in TOR client. Once enabled and configured I was able to sign on once again. Using ethereal to sniff traffic coming from scatterchat I was able to determine that none of my communications were being sent clear text at this point.
Installing scatterchat on multiple machines I found that scatterchat worked well but wasn’t without flaws. To start, scatterchat appears to not open cert information correctly on windows xp until you log off and log back on. When reconfiguring TOR to use a proxy I found that when I typed my proxy password in, not only was it shown on screen as typed (No stars covering password) but that password was also stored clear text in bc_prefs.txt.
Even with the above stated problems I believe Scatterchat can still be a valuable resource although not a physically secure one. According to http://scatterchat.com/contribute.html. Version 2 is in its release candidacy with development soon starting on version 3.
To get your own copy of scatterchat check out http://scatterchat.com
Also see:
http://hacktivismo.com/
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/