Secure IRC

How about the idea of a secure Internet Relay Chat?
 
A central server might maintain the list of everybody's Public Keys.
If you wanted to broadcast a 'public' yet secure msg in a particular
room making sure only participants in that room (and not eavesdroppers
somewhere else on the wire) could read the msg you could encrypt
your broadcast with the server's own Public Key.  Send it.
The Server receives it, decrypts it, then for each of the participants
currently in this particular room, the server encrypts the msg
with that person's Public Key and sends it.  Private IRC msgs
would be treated similarly, except that they'd be re-encrypted
only once, for the intended private recipient.

Anyone interested on working on this?  0r 1z 1t 2 layme?
 
-- /|n0n1mu$

The problem with central servers is that they are prone to single
point failure.  That failure may be computer down or key compromise.
A good criterion for this kind of design is not to use central
servers.  This is almost always possible.  (Or always possible,
depending on who you ask.)

There is also the question about getting permission to enter a room,
which corresponds to an authentication or a key distribution or a
voting algorithm or some sort.  You need to know how you want that
_social_ interaction to work before you design protocols.  You should
implement that sociality and test it without encryption to make sure
it's what you want.  Is this sounding familiar?

Eric