Re: Gopher over TLS

On 3/14/20 11:18 AM, Emil Engler wrote:
> Hi, I thought about writing a standard for a secure Gopher protocol
> (short gophers).
> Have there been any proposals for this yet and what's the general
> consensus about this on this ML

There are some implementations in place. Solderpunk's vf-1 has TLS
support (called Battle Mode). Jan is adding TLS support to ncgopher as
well. The big question becomes how it's served.

gopher://cosmic.voyage serves TLS on port 7070. Previous discussions had
some people suggesting port 7443, 7000, or 71. A server that serves over
port 70 is likely to break things for non TLS clients.

I phlogged about an easy way to set up TLS support with gophernicus and
stunnel last year:

gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20190120-gophernicus-tls-howto

And I just posted an update about it today when I realized things were
breaking due to lets encrypt:

gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20200314-tls-on-gopher-update

As a side note, I've decided instead to run tor hidden services on
gopher.black and tilde.black rather than setting up gopher over TLS. It
gives me end-to-end encryption, offers readers some anonymity, and adds
to the overall usage of tor which is a net plus. I have my how-to guides
on that on the phlog as well.