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tor email w/pgp encryption
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tor email w/pgp encryption

for the tor experts, how safe is it to setup a private email server with pgp encryption over the tor network?

Comments

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep
    edited January 2016

    Safe in what sense? The server will not explode simply because you install Tor and PGP, if that's what you're asking.

    If you mean whether your government can identify you if they wanted to, then it's hard to say since you haven't really describe your plan at all, for example how are you going to get an e-mail address with an actual domain over a Tor hidden service? Or maybe you want to use GMail with PGP and access the web interface via Tor?

  • Sending actual SMTP over tor so you can communicate inside the network? Setting up just webmail over tor is pointless as the server hosting the email server will still be linked to you, and you can't send SMTP through Tor exit nodes although you might be able to relay it with mandrill on al alternate port...

  • akzakz Member

    @perennate yes that is what I am trying to ask.

    I was looking to see how difficult it would be to create a service like sigiant but private only restricted to a few users. It wouldnt necessarily be required to have the e-mail addresses over the regular interwebs but just through tor and a client on android/ios to receive emails through would be fine. Just looking if it was a possibility.

  • akz said: I was looking to see how difficult it would be to create a service like sigiant but private only restricted to a few users. It wouldnt necessarily be required to have the e-mail addresses over the regular interwebs but just through tor and a client on android/ios to receive emails through would be fine. Just looking if it was a possibility.

    Google for "SMTP over tor", looks like a few people have already done it

    Thanked by 1akz
  • akzakz Member

    @linuxthefish said:
    Google for "SMTP over tor", looks like a few people have already done it

    nice that is what I am looking for I just wasnt searching the correct terminology. So essentially you would still have a regular domain but your smtp is just routing through TOR itself. I guess for added security one could implement PGP as well.

    what about having the service send and receive only within the tor network and never leaving the tor network?

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    akz said: what about having the service send and receive only within the tor network and never leaving the tor network?

    You can set up some iptables rules to route outgoing traffic over Tor: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TransparentProxy

  • linuxthefishlinuxthefish Member
    edited January 2016

    akz said: what about having the service send and receive only within the tor network and never leaving the tor network?

    That's exactly what it would do! An ideal config for this would be 2 VPS's, setup like so:

    VPS1:

    1x internal IP
    1x external IP
    tor client, transparent proxy and with it's SOCKS proxy listening on the internal IP address and setup to forward VPS2 to a hidden service.

    VPS2:

    1x internal IP
    0x external IP
    Set to use VPS1 as gateway for tor transparent proxy
    Mail server and webmail going through into the Tor network

    All outbound connections from VPS2 will then be going through the Tor network, so you could even connect to an SMTP relay on alternate port or API for sending emails to the outside world without exposing your IP address. Even if there was a bug in your webmail that allowed it to make requests to non-tor IP's, all connections would still be routed through a Tor exit node as the transparent proxy is in place.

    You could do this with firewall rules, but it's much safer to have 2 separate containers to avoid nasty surprises when someone accidently does iptables -F...

    Thanked by 1akz
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