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ajayre
n00b
Joined: 21 Apr 2006
Posts: 12
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 Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:03 am Post subject: Securing Public WiFi Using SSH? VPN? |
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Just finished installing gentoo on my ancient PC that used to run Windows 98. The poor thing was too slow to run Firefox, etc. so thanks to you guys it now has a second life. 
I wondered if the following was possible and how I can go about it. I've searched before on ways to do this but I didn't get very far.
When I am traveling on business I often stay in hotels with WiFi or pass through airports with WiFi. However I don't like to use it because I visit web sites where user/name password is not encrypted, and the username/password for my POP3 mail server is not encrypted. Also I wonder if cookie information is transfered to/from sites encrypted.
Is it possible to tunnel all internet comms from my laptop at a WiFi access point through SSH or VPN to my linux server at home, and then back out on to the internet?
Every web page that I have seen regarding SSH and VPN seems to only deal with getting secure access to a remote network, but I'm not really interested in that. I'm already using SSH on gentoo to access the shell and ftp.
Any pointers to particular web site or packages would be very much appreciated! Or even pitfalls to the whole idea. Thanks!
Andy |
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TheRAt
Veteran
Joined: 03 Jun 2002
Posts: 1580
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| Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:25 am Post subject: |
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you might like to see if these would do the trick for you...
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zen_guerrilla
Guru
Joined: 18 Apr 2002
Posts: 343
Location: Greece
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| Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:51 am Post subject: |
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If you have another box on-line you can use a VPN (like openvpn) to securely connect to it from your laptop. After that, either connect with VNC on the remote box and run a web browser or install squid on it and use it as a proxy. OpenVPN has decent documentation on its webpage, along with some nice examples included on the installation, so I guess it should be trivial to set it up.
OpenSSH 4.3 has a tunneling feature similar to the openvpn concept, and it might be an alternative. Check its man pages for more information. |
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sschlueter
Guru
Joined: 26 Jul 2002
Posts: 578
Location: Dortmund, Germany
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| Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 2:27 am Post subject: |
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| zen_guerrilla wrote: | | If you have another box on-line you can use a VPN (like openvpn) to securely connect to it from your laptop. After that, either connect with VNC on the remote box and run a web browser or install squid on it and use it as a proxy. |
You can even tunnel all network traffic through the OpenVPN connection. The server would have to be configured as a NAT gateway and the client would have to set its default gateway so that is uses the tunnel for everything. OpenVPN can automatically set this default gateway when the "redirect-gateway" option is set.
Once this is set up, it's a completely transparent and hassle-free solution |
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ajayre
n00b
Joined: 21 Apr 2006
Posts: 12
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| Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 3:50 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the pointers! I'll starting focusing my research.
Andy |
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