PyChat

PyChat is a UDP based terminal chatting program that allows multiple devices to communicate together over a secure connection using an algorithm of their choice. The purpose of the project is to explore encryption algorithms and sending data back and forth securely and minimizing options for external sources to decrypt the data. The project is maintained by Ben Soer and Kurtis Bohlen.

Setup

Prerequisites

You must have python 3.4 installed on your system. On linux this is available on most distros as python3. You can check by typing python3 --version into your linux bash

You will need to have pip installed aswell in order to download the pycrypto library needed for some of the algorithms

Installation/Quickstart

For the rest of the app:

1. Download the latest release from https://github.com/bensoer/pychat/releases
2. Execute sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt
3. Start the program by calling

python3 pychat.py -h localhost -p 7000 -lp 8000 -u bert -a CaesarCipher

This will start PyChat on localhost calling another user on port 7000 and listening for responses on 8000. The converstion will be encrypted with a CaesarCipher. Your username for the other user will appear in this example as bert. Note that the CaesarCipher has additional optional parameters. Since we did not use them, default CaesarCipher setings were used.

For full documentation see https://pychat.readthedocs.io

Developer Notes

Apr 28/2016 - Three new ciphers have been added! Second Release is coming!
March 10/2017 - Pure AES, RSA algorithms along with added Hashing functionality