SSH Tunneling – VPN-like Solution

linuxsockssshvpn

Socksify, tsocks, proxycommand in ssh, they're great softwares/solutions that can be used to "constrain" given apps to use a SOCKS5 proxy (what was created with an SSH TUNNEL). Even if the given apps doesn't support to use SOCKS5.

But: Are there any solutions to use an SSH Tunnel to "constrain" all the traffic on a PC to it? So it would be like some "kind of a VPN solution". So all the traffic from the PC would go through only in the SSH Tunnel.

Are there any solutions for this? It would be a very-very-very good feature.

p.s.: because installing OpenVPN vs. Installing SSHD+restrict a ssh user to only have "ssh tunneling" permissions is much simpler…

Thank you.

Best Answer

Just found a new solution for this recently that is REALLY neat. Take a look at sshuttle.

https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/

Related Solutions

Ssh – Run SSH over a SOCKS proxy

Similar topic was discussed in SU:

openssh itself doesn't understand the socks_proxy environment variables. You need to use for example netcat to direct the traffic over the proxy:

 ssh -o ProxyCommand='nc -X 5 --proxy 127.0.0.1:8088 %h %p' user@host

To forward DNS requests, it will be more complicated, because low-level functions in openssh do not respect environmental variables. You will probably need to set up your local DNS resolver, which will forward the requests to the proxy. There is dns-tcp-socks-proxy, which should handle.

./dns_proxy --socks_port=8088 --listen_port=53

When you will have this daemon running, you should set up the your /etc/resolv.conf (hope Mac respects this one) to use this DNS.

nameserver 127.0.0.1

Simple test should be possible using dig again, but when this resolver if functional, you will not need the proxy part:

dig example.com

Alternative as jumpbox:

As an easy alternative, I can recommend using normal the host as a jumphost, skip the proxy part and do IO redirect using -W switch:

ssh -oProxyCommand="ssh -W %h:%p jumpbox" destination_host

It should do the dns resoving and routing on the jumpbox. This option can be easily incorporated into your ~/.ssh/config

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ssh – Run SSH over a SOCKS proxy

Alternative as jumpbox:

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