A Very Basic Guide To SSH Tunnelling To Bypass Web Filters

SSh, Secure Shell, is a program and protocol for securely logging in to and running programs on remote machines across a network, with encryption to protect the transferred information and authentication to ensure that the remote machine is the one desired; To use ssh to connect to a remote computer. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to do simple ssh tunnelling to bypass web filters.

We'll be using a ssh client in this tutorial. One such SSh client is putty and we be using putty in our tutorial. It can be downloaded from HERE. We need a working SSh account and there are lots of free as well as paid free shell providers. I'll be using one of the shell accounts for this tutorial.

After downloading putty, open the program and enter the host and port information. The screenshot below will be helpful for you.

Now go to the SSh option below in the left menu of Putty. And select the tunnels submenu. Set the source port to any higher ports. I chose 8080 in my example. Then select the dynamic option. And click on Add by leaving other options as they are.

Now, click on Open and login to your SSh server. The only thing left now is to setup your favourite browser to work with the SSh tunnel. In firefox(under ubuntu), I go to Edit - Preferences - Advanced - Network - Settings to set the proper proxy configuration. The setup entry will be:

Socks host: localhost
Port: 8080

That's all for setup. Now you can use the ssh tunnel to browse webspace by bypassing web filters in your school or office. I hope it was useful. Thanks. :)