BitchX is a free IRC client that has been regarded as the most popular ircII-based IRC client. The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a script for the IrcII chat client. multiple servers and SSL, and a subset of UTF-8 (characters contained in ISO-8859-1) with an unofficial patch.
On several occasions, BitchX has been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems.
The latest official release is version 1.2.
BitchX does not yet support Unicode.
Security
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.
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.
The aforementioned vulnerabilities were fixed in the sources for the 1.2 release.
See also
- Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients
- Internet Relay Chat
- Internet Relay Chat Client