Infosec Pals

There are myriad of tutorials available that spoon feed how to setup a SOCKS dynamic proxy connection using SSH. The problem with all of these setups is they assume you are in control of the SSH server and can run as root (dynamic proxy only works as root) and the application that you intend to tunnel has SOCKS proxy support.

If you have tried to tunnel any traffic through university SSH accounts or tried to tunnel IM clients through SSH SOCKS proxy you will soon realize they don’t work with any of the SOCKS proxy instructions.

Most IM clients don’t support SOCKS or if the do they don’t work well. On the other hand HTTP proxies work universally well with all type of applications. Production level proxies like squid can be setup on SSH servers but again require root access. The trick is to find a small enough command line HTTP proxy that works on any SSH shell account. I have been using one called ‘stone repeater’, this small little tool is not only good port redirector but also a decent light weight HTTP proxy.

The quick version is like

1. Get yourself a SSH shell account either on your own home Linux router or at a public servers/hosting provider
2. wget http://www.gcd.org/sengoku/stone/stone-2.3c.tar.gz
3. tar -xvzf stone-2.3c.tar.gz
4. cd stone-2.3c
5. make linux
6. ./stone -r proxy 8088 localhost
7. setup port forward in Putty - 8090 to localhost:8088
8. setup HTTP proxy on your browser to localhost:8090
   

The localhost in (6) restricts the connection from the localhost it prevents unauthorized connections to your HTTP proxy.

The stone repeater also works on Windows, so if you don’t really care for the security of the SSH tunnel you can still get your traffic out of a restricted environment out through another box you control (eg. a home desktop). Just run stone repeater on a higher number port and restrict the connection to your specific incoming IP. You can also run SSHD on your Windows box, step by step instructions are available at: http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html

It’s not the best HTTP proxy available, but this is truly a light weight tunnel you can use with any SSH shell account, goodbye SOCKS and ROOT permissions!

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