A stupid question: FTN on tor via onions reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2021-06-22 04:34 There is no good reason to do this that I can think of...I've been messing around lately with Mystic and FTNs. It's been a long time since I looked at these (decades), and I am surprised to learn there are around 30 of these up and running. I have no idea how many of them are active, but...man that's a lot. It's not too hard to get a basic BBS set up on the tor network; I did it for a short time just to see. Does anyone know if you could run a tor-based FTN, like whether or not most mailers would accept .onion addresses rather than standard hostnames or IP addresses? Again, just a kind of "what if." Curious if anyone has attempted this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2021-06-29 13:19 Quick answer; can one resolve an onion address with the OS's dns resolver? No.. then not going to happen. Long answer, yeah but.. The architecture to pull this off; and yes I'm working on that very same project for defcon and as an ARG/CTF. Really comes down to if your BBS is the hub then that's got to be using common dns and tcp/ip. While everything else just uses a tosser (equivalent to an rfc822 MDA) to reach out over tor via some gateway. To make it happen your going to have to wrap your tosser behind torsocks, then use binkd and the husky project. The other option is to just setup an smtp and nntp gateway behind your onion address with ifcico most likely able to access with torsocks while Ifmail could work but forks to sendmail thus losing the torsock connection. I do know however that MysticBBS does well with Zerotier, VPN, lives nicely behind haproxy and therefore could act as an entry point to a fidonet style echo net. It even includes the ifcico tosser so with some reconfig your could get mystic to somewhat work via cronjobs and torsocks, which is what we're doing over at XMcore. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2021-06-29 15:18 Thanks for the response. I wondered if someone else had looked at this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2021-06-29 15:26 If your ever in the dfw area then keep your eyes out for bluetooth beacons and hidden wifi hotspots. Xmcore is working with r2600 and DHA in putting up a hidden FTN style network as a sort of Dropbox and retro social network. We'll also open source the set up on github after defcon. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PaulLee420 · 2021-07-01 01:53 Sounds really cool - I'll keep an eye out for github release. Freaking awesome what ppl are STILL doing with these protocols.... thank you for keeping the flame alive! Swing by [20ForBeers.com:1337](https://20ForBeers.com:1337) ANSI telnet... I'm interested in yer def project.