The iFlame Message System

``I Flame, You Flame, We All Flame for iFlame''

David M. LaMacchia

What's New

May 19, 1996
The thesis is complete. You can download a postscript copy here.

Apr 18, 1996
The iFlame beta is pretty much complete, and I've put the code on hold while writing the thesis. A few more fixes and the code will be releasable.

Mar 25, 1996
It's been a month since the last update to this page, so I thought I'd put up a note. The current version of iFlame is close to complete; with a little tweaking it should be ready to go into an alpha-like testing state. PGP hooks are in place, but I may hold off until after the thesis is written to finish that code. Otherwise, the display code, acl manipulation, tcl scripting, etc., etc. are complete.

Feb 25, 1996
MIME support completed, seamless integration on both sending and receiving clients. Yea! We can now send images and audio. One step closer to encrypted iFlamePhone, I suppose. Authentication mechanisms completed, except for PGP. New display code (to handle text/iflame content-type) being worked on.

Feb 13, 1996
iFlame is now officially my (Dave's) thesis for my Masters degree. While Brian and I finished a working product in May of last year, the current state of the system has developed far beyond what we had then.

Notable changes:

The client now uses a round-robin concurrent system to provide multi-threaded connections to servers and other clients.
The server has been modified to support user authentication (password, pgp) and interacts with a gdbm-based database (though this may be changed to ndbm before it's done).
MIME support for sending arbitrary data is almost complete.
iFlame messages encoded in text/iflame content type, support to be given by external iFlame viewer (most likely tcl/tk-based, similar to the old one, since tcl/tk is available for windows now).
PGP encryption available with minimum of user interaction.

Err...so is this thing ever going to be released?
Expect to see a beta version sometime before I (Dave) graduate. Probably May. I need to finish the PGP hooks and if I expect to get folks to use this, a windows version of the client. Oh, and I need to rewrite the display program. Right now, though, it's working pretty well with just text.

We propose iFlame as a solution for an integrated message system. It is designed to allow various interfaces depending on the user's preferences backed by authentication and encryption and a scalable model for providing Internet wide service. Below is a discussion our initial design which will be further refined as time goes on.

There's not much here at the moment. We are looking forward to our initial release. Please contact us if you're interested in beta testing.

6.853: Computer Systems

6.853 is a graduate course in computer systems at MIT. The course has a term-long project, which we wrote iFlame for. We wrote some other papers for the course.

iFlame Papers

David M. LaMacchia <[email protected]>

Brian D. Carlstrom <[email protected]>