Re: TLS in Gopher

[Kim Holviala <kimholviala@fastmail.com>]

On 27 Feb 2018, at 20.08, Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net> wrote:
> 
> Ideal way:
> 
>    C->S: STARTTLS\r\n
>    S->C: <TLS begins on both sides>
>    C->S(in TLS): selector[\tsearch]\r\n
>    S->C(in TLS): answer

Starttls is nice but requires gopher servers to be complied with OpenSSL or similar and will not work with inetd-based servers (because TLS would need to be initialized from scratch for each connection). So it will conpletely kill any simplicity gopher might have had. Dedicated TLS port (7443?) would work with TLS wrappers leaving the gopher server itself simple and the codebase understandable.

But I'm not going to veto STARTTLS either because yes, it does solve many problems.


- Kim