Back in 2013 I wrote about using socat with Tor to setup a Hidden Service chat. It was pretty simple to setup and I wanted to see how much harder it would be to do with Whonix , since the Gateway handles Tor and the Workstation should run socat. Ends up it isn’t hard at all.
On the Gateway you need to edit /usr/local/etc/torrc.d/50_user.conf (as root)
and add a Hidden Service to it:
Whonix has released version 14.0.0.9.6 of their XFCE KVM build . Whonix is a Debian based operating system that routes all network traffic through the Tor network . It is included as part of Qubes OS or you can run disk images using your favorite virtualization solution.
Their KVM release includes xml files for importing into libvirt , but sometimes that’s a bit too heavy of a solution and you want something simple where you don’t need to be root to set it up or run it. QEMU can do this, with a few more cmdline arguments.
It is easy to setup a simple chat over Tor using the socat utility. To receive incoming messages you first need to setup a Tor hidden service . Add this to the end of your /etc/tor/torrc file:
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden-chat/
HiddenServicePort 2330 127.0.0.1:2330
After restarting Tor check the /var/lib/tor/hidden-chat/hostname file for your hidden service .onion address.
Use socat to setup a listener on port 2330, now incoming connections to ADDRESS.onion:2330 will show up on your terminal. Run this on the system where you setup the hidden service.