Use SSH as Proxy for Secure Connection in Linux
Internet is cool but still security matters, if you jump into my network I can monitor your data (webpages you load) but if they are secure i.e. loading to SSL then I can’t read or access those.
Now SSH is Secure Shell using SSL for communication between local and online server and we are gonna utilize this SSL for our connections to making every webpage you load pass through a secure connection and make it encrypted. We are gonna forward every connection to a SSH server by running this:
ssh -D 8080 user@server...
Once you are connected to the SSH server, test the connection using curl. Trying this
curl --proxy 127.0.0.1:8080 http://testsite.com
The above returns no reply from server
curl --socks5 127.0.0.1:8080 http://testsite.com
But the above gets a reply, this SSH function does not support HTTP Proxy but SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 for now. So configure your FireFox, goto Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings; choose Manual Proxy Configuration then leave other fields empty only fill the SOCKS Host and save. Enjoy your secure browsing… 🙂
James John
Software Engineer