BitchX


BitchX is a free IRC client and has been considered to be the most popular ircII-based IRC client. 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. 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 is originally based on ircII-EPIC and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports IPv6, multiple servers and SSL and a subset of UTF-8 with an unofficial patch.
BitchX has frequently 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.
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.