Written by hannes

Back in 2014, when we implemented TLS in OCaml, at some point I was bored with TLS. I usually need at least two projects (but not more than 5) at the same time to procrastinate the one I should do with the other one - it is always more fun to do what you're not supposed to do. I started to implement another security protocol (Off-the-record, resulted in ocaml-otr) on my own, applying what I learned while co-developing TLS with David. I was eager to actually deploy our TLS stack: using it with a web server (see this post) is fun, but only using one half of the state machine (server side) and usually short-lived connections (discovers lots of issues with connection establishment) - not the client side and no long living connection (which may discover other kinds of issues, such as leaking memory).

To use the stack, I needed to find an application I use on a daily basis (thus I'm eager to get it up and running if it fails to work). Mail client or web client are just a bit too big for a spare time project (maybe not ;). Another communication protocol I use daily is jabber, or XMPP. Back then I used mcabber inside a terminal, which is a curses based client written in C.

I started to develop jackline (first commit is 13th November 2014), a terminal based XMPP client in OCaml. This is a report of a work-in-progress (unreleased, but publicly available!) software project. I'm not happy with the code base, but neverthelss consider it to be a successful project: dozens of friends are using it (no exact numbers), I got contributions from other people (more than 25 commits from more than 8 individuals), I use it on a daily basis for lots of personal communication.

What is XMPP?

The eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (previously known as Jabber) describes (these days as RFC 6120) a communication protocol based on XML fragments, which enables near real-time exchange of structured (and extensible) data between two network entities.

The landscape of instant messaging used to contain ICQ, AOL instant messenger, and MSN messenger. In 1999, people defined a completely open protocol standard, then named Jabber, since 2011 official RFCs. It is a federated (similar to eMail) near-real time extensible messaging system (including presence information) used for instant messaging. Extensions include end-to-end encryption, multi-user chat, audio transport, ... Unicode support is builtin, everything is UTF8 encoded.

There are various open jabber servers where people can register accounts, as well as closed ones. Google Talk used to federate (until 2014) into XMPP, Facebook chat used to be based on XMPP. Those big companies wanted something "more usable" (where they're more in control, reliable message delivery via caching in the server and mandatory delivery receipts, multiple devices all getting the same messages), and thus moved away from the open standard.

XMPP Security

Authentication is done via a TLS channel (where your client should authenticate the server), and SASL that the server authenticates your client. I investigated in 2008 (in German) which clients and servers use which authentication methods (I hope the state of certificate verification improved in the last decade).

End-to-end encryption is achievable using OpenPGP (rarely used in my group of friends) via XMPP, or Off-the-record, which was pioneered over XMPP, and is still in wide use - it gave rise to forward secrecy: if your long-term (stored on disk) asymmetric keys get seized or stolen, they are not sufficient to decrypt recorded sessions (you can't derive the session key from the asymmetric keys) -- but the encrypted channel is still authenticated (once you verified the public key via a different channel or a shared secret, using the Socialist millionaires problem).

OTR does not support offline messages (the session keys may already be destroyed by the time the communication partner reconnects and receives the stored messages), and thus recently omemo was developed. Other messaging protocols (Signal, Threema) are not really open, support no federation, but have good support for group encryption and offline messaging. (There is a nice overview over secure messaging and threats.)

There is (AFAIK) no encrypted group messaging via XMPP; also the XMPP server contains lots of sensible data: your address book (buddy list), together with offline messages, nicknames you gave to your buddies, subscription information, and information every time you connect (research of privacy preserving presence protocols has been done, but is not widely used AFAIK, e.g. DP5).

XMPP client landscape

See wikipedia for an extensive comparison (which does not mention jackline :P).

A more opinionated analysis is that you were free to choose between C - where all code has to do manual memory management and bounds checking - with ncurses (or GTK) and OpenSSL (or GnuTLS) using libpurple (or some other barely maintained library which tries to unify all instant messaging protocols), or Python - where you barely know upfront what it will do at runtime - with GTK and some OpenSSL, or even JavaScript - where external scripts can dynamically modify the prototype of everything at runtime (and thus modify code arbitrarily, violating invariants) - calling out to C libraries (NSS, maybe libpurple, who knows?).

Due to complex APIs of transport layer security, certificate verification is still not always done correctly (that's just one example, you'll find more) - even if, it may not allow custom trust anchors or certificate fingerprint based verification - which are crucial for a federated operations without a centralised trust authority.

Large old code basis usually gather dust and getting bitrot - and if you add patch by patch from random people on the Internet, you've to deal with the most common bug: insufficient checking of input (or output data, if you encrypt only the plain body, but not the marked up one). In some programming languages this easily leads to execution of remote code, other programming languages steal the work from programmers by deploying automated memory management (finally machines take our work away! :)) - also named garbage collection, often used together with automated bounds checking -- this doesn't mean that you're safe - there are still logical flaws, and integer overflows (and funny things which happen at resource starvation), etc.

Goals and non-goals

My upfront motivation was to write and use an XMPP client tailored to my needs. I personally don't use many graphical applications (coding in emacs, mail via thunderbird, firefox, mplayer, mupdf), but stick mostly to terminal applications. I additionally don't use any terminal multiplexer (saw too many active screen sessions on remote servers where people left root shells open).

The goal was from the beginning to write a "minimalistic graphical user interface for a secure (fail hard) and trustworthy XMPP client". By fail hard I mean exactly that: if it can't authenticate the server, don't send the password. If there is no end-to-end encrypted session, don't send the message.

As a user of (unreleased) software, there is a single property which I like to preserve: continue to support all data written to persistent storage. Even during large refactorings, ensure that data on the user's disk will also be correctly parsed. There is nothing worse than having to manually configure an application after update. The solution is straightforward: put a version in every file you write, and keep readers for all versions ever written around. My favourite marshalling format (human readable, structured) are still S-expressions - luckily there is a sexplib in OCaml for handling these. Additionally, once the initial configuration file has been created (e.g. interactively with the application), the application does no further writes to the config file. Users can make arbitrary modifications to the file, and restart the application (and they can make changes while the application is running).

I also appreciate another property of software: don't ever transmit any data or open a network connection unless initiated by the user (this means no autoconnect on startup, or user is typing indications). Don't be obviously fingerprintable. A more mainstream demand is surely that software should not phone home - that's why I don't know how many people are using jackline, reports based on friends opinions are hundreds of users, I personally know at least several dozens.

As written earlier, I often take a look at the trusted computing base of a computer system. Jackline's trusted computing base consists of the client software itself, its OCaml dependencies (including OTR, TLS, tty library, ...), then the OCaml runtime system, which uses some parts of libc, and a whole UNIX kernel underneath -- one goal is to have jackline running as a unikernel (then you connect via SSH or telnet and TLS).

There are only a few features I need in an XMPP client: single account, strict validation, delivery receipts, notification callback, being able to deal with friends logged in multiple times with wrongly set priorities - and end-to-end encryption. I don't need inline HTML, avatar images, my currently running music, leaking timezone information, etc. I explicitly don't want to import any private key material from other clients and libraries, because I want to ensure that the key was generated by a good random number generator (read David's blog article on randomness and entropy).

The security story is crucial: always do strict certificate validation, fail hard, make it noticable by the user if they're doing insecure communication. Only few people are into reading out loud their OTR public key fingerprint, and SMP is not trivial -- thus jackline records the known public keys together with a set of resources used, a session count, and blurred timestamps (accuracy: day) when the publickey was initially used and when it was used the last time.

I'm pragmatic - if there is some server (or client) deployed out there which violates (my interpretation of) the specification, I'm happy to implement workarounds. Initially I worked roughly one day a week on jackline.

To not release the software for some years was something I learned from the slime project (watch Luke's presentation from 2013) - if there's someone complaining about an issue, fix it within 10 minutes and ask them to update. This only works if each user compiles the git version anyways.

User interface

Stated goal is minimalistic. No heavy use of colours. Visibility on both black and white background (btw, as a Unix process there is no way to find out your background colour (or is there?)). The focus is also security - and that's where I used colours from the beginning: red is unencrypted (non end-to-end, there's always the transport layer encryption) communication, green is encrypted communication. Verification status of the public key uses the same colours: red for not verified, green for verified. Instead of colouring each message individually, I use the encryption status of the active contact (highlighted in the contact list, where messages you type now will be sent to) to colour the entire frame. This results in a remarkable visual indication and (at least I) think twice before presssing return in a red terminal. Messages were initially white/black, but got a bit fancier over time: incoming messages are bold, multi user messages mentioning your nick are underlined.

The graphical design is mainly inspired by mcabber, as mentioned earlier. There are four components: the contact list in the upper left, chat window upper right, log window on the bottom (surrounded by two status bars), and a readline input. The sizes are configurable (via commands and key shortcuts). A different view is having the chat window fullscreen (or only the received messages) - useful for copy and pasting fragments. Navigation is done in the contact list. There is a single active contact (colours are inverted in the contact list, and the contact is mentioned in the status bar), whose chat messages are displayed.

There is not much support for customisation - some people demanded to have a 7bit ASCII version (I output some unicode characters for layout). Recently I added support to customise the colours. I tried to ensure it looks fine on both black and white background.

Code

Initially I targeted GTK with OCaml, but that excursion only lasted two weeks, when I switched to a lambda-term terminal interface.

UI

The lambda-term interface survived for a good year (until 7th Feb 2016), when I started to use notty - developed by David - using a decent unicode library.

Notty back then was under heavy development, I spend several hours rebasing jackline to updates in notty. What I got out of it is proper unicode support: the symbol 茶 gets two characters width (see screenshot at top of page), and the layouting keeps track how many characters are already written on the terminal.

I recommend to look into notty if you want to do terminal graphics in OCaml!

Application logic and state

Stepping back, an XMPP client reacts to two input sources: the user input (including terminal resize), and network input (or failure). The output is a screen (80x25 characters) image. Each input event can trigger output events on the display and the network.

I used to use multiple threads and locking between shared data for these kinds of applications: there can go something wrong when network and user input happens at the same time, or what if the output is interrupted by more input (which happens e.g. during copy and paste).

Initially I used lots of shared data and had hope, but this was clearly not a good solution. Nowadays I use mailboxes, and separate tasks which wait for receiving a message: one task which writes persistent data (session counts, verified fingerprints) periodically to ask, another which writes on change to disk, an error handler ( init_system ) which resets the state upon a connection failure, another task which waits for user input ( read_terminal ), one waiting for network input ( Connect , including reconnecting timers), one to call out the notification hooks ( Notify ), etc. The main task is simple: wait for input, process input (producing a new state), render the state, and recursively call itself ( loop ).

Only recently I solved the copy and paste issue by delaying all redraws by 40ms, and canceling if another redraw is scheduled.

The whole state contains some user interface parameters ( /buddywith , /logheight , ..), as well as the contact map, which contain users, which have sessions, each containing chat messages.

The code base is just below 6000 lines of code (way too big ;), and nowadays supports multi-user chat, sane multi-resource interaction (press enter to show all available resources of a contact and message each individually in case you need to), configurable colours, tab completions for nicknames and commands, per-user input history, emacs keybindings. It even works with the XMPP gateway provided by slack (some startup doing a centralised groupchat with picture embedding and animated cats).

Road ahead

Common feature requests are: omemo support, IRC support, support for multiple accounts (tbh, these are all things I'd like to have as well).

But there's some mess to clean up:

The XMPP library makes heavy use of functors (to abstract over the concrete IO, etc.), and embeds IO deep inside it. I do prefer (see e.g. our TLS paper, or my ARP post) these days to have a pure interface for the protocol implementation, providing explicit input (state, event, data), and output (state, action, potentially data to send on network, potentially data to process by the application). The sasl implementation is partial and deeply embedded. The XML parser is as well deeply embedded (and has some issues). The library needs to be torn apart (something I procrastinate since more than a year). Once it is pure, the application can have full control over when to call IO (and esp use the same protocol implementation as well for registering a new account - currently not supported). On the frontend side (the cli subfolder), there is too much knowledge of XMPP. It should be more general, and be reusable (some bits and pieces are notty utilities, such as wrapping a string to fit into a text box of specific width, see split_unicode ). The command processing engine itself is 1300 lines (including ad-hoc string parsing) ( Cli_commands ), best to replaced by a more decent command abstraction. A big record of functions ( user_data ) is passed (during /connect in handle_connect ) from the UI to the XMPP task to inject messages and errors. The global variable xmpp_session should be part of the earlier mentioned cli_state , also contacts should be a map, not a Hashtbl (took me some time to learn). Having jackline self-hosted as a MirageOS unikernel. I've implemented a a telnet server, there is a notty branch be used with the telnet server. But there is (right now) no good story for persistent mutable storage. Jackline predates some very elegant libraries, such as logs and astring, even result - since 4.03 part of Pervasives - is not used. Clearly, other libraries (such as TLS) do not yet use result. After looking in more depths at the logs library, and at user interfaces - I envision the graphical parts to be (mostly!?) a viewer of logs, and a command shell (using a control interface, maybe 9p): Multiple layers (of a protocol), slightly related (by tags - such as the OTR session), and have the layers be visible to users (see also tlstools), a slightly different interface of similarly structured data. In jackline I'd like to e.g. see all messages of a single OTR session (see issue), or hide the presence messages in a multi-user chat, investigate the high-level message, its XML encoded stanza, TLS encrypted frames, the TCP flow, all down to the ethernet frames send over the wire - also viewable as sequence diagram and other suitable (terminal) presentations (TCP window size maybe in a size over time diagram). Once the API between the sources (contacts, hosts) and the UI (what to display, where and how to trigger notifications, where and how to handle global changes (such as reconnect)) is clear and implemented, commands need to be reinvented (some, such as navigation commands and emacs keybindings, are generic to the user interface, others are specific to XMPP and/or OTR): a new transport (IRC) or end-to-end crypto protocol (omemo) - should be easy to integrate (with similar minimal UI features and colours).

Conclusion

Jackline started as a procrastination project, and still is one. I only develop on jackline if I enjoy it. I'm not scared to try new approaches in jackline, and either reverting them or rewriting some chunks of code again. It is a project where I publish early and push often. I've met several people (whom I don't think I know personally) in the multi-user chatroom jackline@conference.jabber.ccc.de , and fixed bugs, discussed features.

When introducing customisable colours, the proximity to a log viewer became again clear to me - configurable colours are for severities such as Success , Warning , Info , Error , Presence - maybe I really should get started on implementing a log viewer.

I would like to have more community contributions to jackline, but the lack of documentation (there aren't even a lot of interface files), mixed with a non-mainstream programming language, and a convoluted code base, makes me want some code cleanups first, or maybe starting from scratch.

I'm interested in feedback, either via twitter or on the jackline repository on GitHub.