How-to: Getting Pass Your Company/School’s Firewall
All work but no play will definitely make John a dull boy. Sometimes you are just tired of work and want to let off some steam by surfing the lighter side of the internet. However, you might not be able to do that in your company or school.
Depending on the system administrator, your access to your internet may only allow you to access work-related only sites. Today, we’ll discuss a technique that will bypass such restrictions and let you browse with an ease of mind.
It’s called Secure Shell (SSH) or Tunnelling. This method replicates a direct tunnel route from your home pc to your work/school pc. The technique itself is securely encrypted, so no one, except you knows what kind of activity is been done within. You can use it to browse your private emails, surf the internet, and/or sFTP.
First, we need some programs for the setup.
- FreeSSHd - Allows you to make a secure remote connection to a windows PC and setup SSH tunnels, allowing other services to connect to your PC securely.
- PuTTY - Putty is a Free SSH client for windows. We need this to connect to the SSH server on the remote PC. It will also allow us to transfer files between the two PC’s.
Installing the SSH Server
You will need to install and configure the FreeSSHd in your home computer so that you are able to tunnel your way from work/school. Download the program at their official website and install it. When it asked for you if you want to run the program as a windows service, click yes.
Once installed, bring up the configuration screen and start setting up the server.
- Click on the SSH tab and enter the port number. You can set it to any port you like, but most standard institution will have port 443 open. This port is for encrypted data transfer such as SSL. So this will give you some cover. Try not to set it for port 22, where most http transfers takes place.
- Next, creating the user for you to login with. Click on the Users tab and “add” a user. Enter the desired username and password. I suggest using the “Password Stored as SHA1 Hash” option for your password.
- Lastly, enable the tunnel access. Click on the Tunneling tab and check the boxes as followed:
Apply your changes and restart your SSH service. You should be able to tunnel now. What’s left is to download your PuTTY program and configure it to connect to your home server.
You can either configure it using a BAT file or from the GUI. Either way works equally fine. I prefer using a BAT file. If you decide to create a BAT file, here’s the syntax for it.
putty -D 8080 -P <port#> -ssh <Home IP Address>
Edit the values in bold. <port#> indicates the port number you have set previously in the FreeSSHd, while <Home IP Address> is your home computer’s IP. Save the file as “<filename>.bat”, without the quotes.
Run the BAT file. Accept the servers public key and login using the credentials of the user you set up earlier. If all has gone well you will see a command line prompt similar to what you see on windows.
Almost there. You will have to set your browser to route using your tunnel access. If you are using Firefox, open up your network connection option tab and do the following:
Internet Explorer users - It’s basically the similar thing. Just on a different option area. You should know where it is.
That’s it! You can officially browse the internet with full access.
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