It's hard to not at least have some level of security nowadays, so you don't have to worry about a passive listener seeing sensitive information, but a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack could defeat encryption, revealing your credentials, chat messages, etc. To prevent this, we can use the same security that you are already used to when browsing the web.

Prerequisites

You're going to need...

• Certbot (you only need the certbot command to work; this guide will explain the rest)
• A domain name that points to your server's IP address ("hostname"). For simplicity, we're going to use x-x-x-x.iptls.com for this.

Obtaining A Certificate

With SpaceNinjaServer (or the Dockerized Server) running:

• cd into the "SpaceNinjaServer" or "OpenWF Dockerized Server" folder
• Run certbot certonly --non-interactive --agree-tos --key-type rsa --webroot -w . -d $(curl http://my.iptls.com)

You should now have a certificate. We're going to assume it's stored in /etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/.

Installing The Certificate

If you're not using Docker:

• Open SpaceNinjaServer's config.json
• Set "httpsCertFile" to "/etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/fullchain.pem" (adjust accordingly)
• Set "httpsKeyFile" to "/etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/privkey.pem" (adjust accordingly)
• Replace the cert files in your IRC server with fullchain.pem for cert.pem and privkey.pem for key.pem, then restart it to apply.

If you are using Docker:

• Open the docker-compose.yml
• Add the following to SpaceNinjaServer's volumes:
  • /etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/fullchain.pem:/etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/fullchain.pem:ro (adjust accordingly)
  • /etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/privkey.pem:/etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/privkey.pem:ro (adjust accordingly)
• Add the following to warframe-irc-server's volumes:
  • /etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/fullchain.pem:/app/cert/cert.pem:ro (adjust accordingly)
  • /etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/privkey.pem:/app/cert/key.pem:ro (adjust accordingly)
• Open SpaceNinjaServer's config.json
• Set "httpsCertFile" to "/etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/fullchain.pem" (adjust accordingly)
• Set "httpsKeyFile" to "/etc/letsencrypt/live/x-x-x-x.iptls.com/privkey.pem" (adjust accordingly)
• Restart the dockerized server for changes to apply fully

Securely Connecting

The client config can now have secure_connections set to true, with server_host being the hostname we got a certificate for.

With secure_connections, a MITM attack will now be surfaced via a connection failure and the attacker won't receive your credentials, chat messages, etc.