Friday, December 3, 2010

SSH + X windows = Poor Man's VPN

I recently posted about firesheep - the no skills required hacking tool that anyone using open Wifi networks could fall victim to. Well, here is a solution for that! If you have a linux machine at home, simply SSH into your machine using the -X argument which will send the interface for any graphical applications to you, as long as you are running linux, Mac OSX with X.11, or an X-windows environment like on your windows machine. When your at your coffee shop, open the command line or terminal and type "SSH your ip adddress - X" and then the command for your web browser, like Firefox, and then you will be using the firefox browser, or other application from your home PC over the secure tunnel.