Use SSH to bypass a firewall OR Browse Securely

With applications on public wifi points like FireSheep, and corporate firewalls blocking access to most locations on the internet of interest – the question comes up quite regularly ” How can I keep secure while on public wifi” or ” How can I bypass my companies firewall.”

This is actually very simple – If you have linux running at home – or have a webserver with access on the internet – follow this brief tutorial.

ssh -C2qTnN -D 8080 username@remote_machine.com

Type this into your local putty or terminal console.

To explain what is happening – in short what we are doing is taking Port 8080 on your local system – and forcing all traffic on that port to your remote ssh server using the username chosen. I STRONGLY URGE YOU NOT TO USE THE ROOT USER !

The options in order we are using are: Compression, SSH2 (for security) Quite, Force, Pseudo-TTY Allocation, Redirection stdin away rom /dev/null – and finally placing the ssh client into “MASTER” for connection sharing.

The next step is quite simple – just go into your browser(s) and set them to use a proxy server – in this case it is simply localhost using port 8080.

If you find you need some tweaking for speed – please let me know as there are a ton of options we can help set in your browser’s about:config section.