[tor-talk] Hidden services, what is recommended

[Griffin Boyce]

Martin S wrote:
> Today I've had a conversation with colleague regarding email
> encryption, encrypted telephony and hidden services on the Tor
> network. In regards to the latter, what - in your opinion - would be
> suitable services to put on Tor (.onion) sites? Would you for example
> put PGP keys exchanges on there? There might be interest in running
> chat or other communications or document sharing.

   Actually, what you're describing are some of the more common uses of 
hidden services.  Some people run xmpp or irc servers as hidden services 
to have truly private chat among their friends (plus you can run a web 
client like qwebirc).  A human rights nonprofit recently asked me to set 
up a PGP public key server as a hidden service.  Lots of people run 
cozy.io instances as hidden services for "personal clouds" calendar, 
contacts, task list, documents etc.  A good friend of mine set up his 
RSS feeds to pipe into a hidden service, and just uses the Tor browser 
to read the news (even if he's in a filtered location).

   For audio chat, Mumble does okay.  I probably wouldn't recommend it as 
an enterprise solution when used over Tor, but it's pretty good when 
using it in push-to-talk mode.

hope this helps!

best,
Griffin

-- 
"I believe that usability is a security concern; systems that do
not pay close attention to the human interaction factors involved
risk failing to provide security by failing to attract users."
~Len Sassaman