DIY secure wireless with SSH/PuTTY
January 8th, 2004I’ve been doing a bunch of wireless lately with my laptop. On publicly available networks, whether paid or free, WEP is usually not enabled, so anyone could easily come by with a tool like kismet and watch your traffic including POP and FTP passwords etc.
As an independent consultant, I don’t have a corporate network with VPN access through which I can secure my communications, so I’ve had to make do with what is available to me.
I have SSHD, smtp and a web proxy server running on my home network, so on my Win2k-based laptop I have set up a PuTTY connection with the following ports forwarded:
6588 – http/s proxy
25 – smtp (allows relay only from self)
110 – pop3 forwarded to pop3.simplefilter.com
On the laptop, I have a hosts file entry mapping the pop3.simplefilter.com to 127.0.0.1, smtp set to localhost, and my browser and Trillian proxy set to localhost:6588.
With this setup, all I have to do is run PuTTY, connect securely via ssh to my home machine, and then all HTTP/S, POP, ICQ, MSN, and YAHOO traffic happens securely through my tunnel. Running netstat on my machine shows one connection home and a bunch of localhost connections.
