Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Howto: Create a SSH Tunnel for Firefox to surf securely!

A ssh tunnel for Firefox to a remote computer is good security measure. Especially when connecting via an untrusted network like a wifi hotspot or other public networks. The tunnel encrypts and sends the data to your remote machine then it is sent over the web to your destination. This tutorial assumes you have an account on a remote machine you can ssh into. This is a pretty easy set up.


Now all you need to do is login your remote computer that you have access to with SSH then issue this 1 command:
ssh -D 9999 -C me@ipaddress.com

The -D switch - Specifies a local “dynamic” application-level port forwarding. We are also adding the -C switch for compression.

Next we need to put the settings into Firefox.

Firefox> Edit> Preferences> Advanced tab> Network tab> Settings button.

Select Manual proxy configuration
SOCKS Host: localhost Port: 9999
SOCKS v5
No Proxy for: localhost, 127.0.0.1

Note: Sometimes localhost can cause a problem. If your settings are right and it still is not working replace localhost with 127.0.0.1.
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3 comments:

  1. Barry CarlyonMarch 25, 2008 at 3:11 PM

    Im a little confused, do you actually type me@ipaddress.com

    and with

    "Now all you need to do is login your remote computer that you have access to with SSH then issue this 1 command:"

    do i login to my remote computer and issue this command, or from terminal in ubuntu do i issue this command?

    Or

    Do I ssh to my remote machine from local, then issue the command using username@the outside ip of the local machine?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousApril 2, 2008 at 7:26 AM

    You should use this command directly from your local machine. ipaddress.com is the address to the remote machine.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownApril 10, 2008 at 7:42 AM

    I think you are still vulnerable to attacks , you should also set the dns over the tunnel with the about:config corresponding option .

    ReplyDelete