Re: Gopher over TLS

[SiMpLe MaChInEs <simple@sdf.org>]

Alex Schr?der <kensanata@gmail.com> wrote:

> I've recently added a Gopher interface to my wiki at alexschroeder.ch. As
> an experiment, I added TLS support to the server and added it to a client,
> too. The client I picked was the simple VF-1 client written in Python.
> Basically it has two modes: TLS mode and normal mode. In normal mode, all
> connections are considered to be normal; in TLS mode all connections are
> considered to be encrypted. I get the feeling that this is better and more
> obvious than having gopher and gophers URL schemas, and figuring out how to
> integrate SSL into existing Gopher menus.
> What do you think?
> You can try it yourself: alexschroeder.ch is the normal site, test it using
> your favorite Gopher client. alexschroeder.ch:7070 is the encrypted site,
> test it using the following:
> echo About | gnutls-cli alexschroeder.ch:7070
> Or use the TLS enabled branch of VF-1,
> https://github.com/kensanata/VF-1/tree/ssl
> vf1 --tls alexschroeder.ch:7070/0About

Nice!  I had to add '--insecure' to gnutls-cli but other than that it works.
Adding TLS to gopher has been talked about on and off for years but usually
the conversation died when it came to extending the gopher std(s).  Perhaps
it's time to revisit it again?