Hack-Me Challenge

Ezra Hale — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:38:11 +0000

Kirbus Hackathon Challenge!!

I have started a literal Hackathon challenge. I have started a "secure" server on the Kirbus registry. There are some significant attack vectors open. If you can hack into the hack-me server, I'll send you $100 (I know it's not a lot, I'm not a rich guy...) but you also get bragging rights. I will acknowledge that you hacked Kirbus here and on LinkedIn. Couple of rules:

Do your worst...
You have to tell me how you did it.
You have to tell me the magic passphrase [FLAG] when you get it.

All the source code is freely available here: https://lnkd.in/eVg_t3Nz

To start you can clone the source or simply use pip:

$ pip install kirbus
$ kirbus --handle

Good luck and have fun hacking!

Kirbus - Created a bbs style P2P chat for fun

Ezra Hale — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:34:35 +0000

Back in college I used to spend hours on BBSes and it's a vibe that never really went away. Modern chat apps are fine but there's something about a terminal UI that just hits different.

So I built kirbus — a peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted terminal chat.

Some highlights:

No accounts — your identity is a local Ed25519 keypair
E2E encrypted — the server never sees message content
Five retro themes (my favorite is the ANSI BBS one, naturally)
Works on LAN or through relay servers
Self-host your own server and registry
pip install kirbus and kirbus --handle to try it.

GitHub: https://github.com/wehale/kirbus

Would love to hear what you think. It's still early but it works and it's been a blast to build.

DEV Community: Ezra Hale

Hack-Me Challenge

Kirbus - Created a bbs style P2P chat for fun