Never again be thwarted by restrictive “guest” wifi (e.g. on buses or airplanes)

This works great, except that some sites seem to block requests from EC2 hosts. StackOverflow and Yelp are two that come to mind immediately although I'm sure there are others. If I remember right, StackOverflow only lets you access via the API if you're on an EC2 host.

On the other hand, I can see where they're coming from by banning the whole netblock. Otherwise you could scrape until your IP get banned for blowing a rate limit, then tear down that instance and spin up a new one.

I'm kinda baffled how this recipe for using ssh, rudimentary sysadmin skills and scripting is deemed news. Maybe back in the heyday of Slashdot, this would be half-interesting -- like, uhh, when OpenSSH actually introduced tunneling, or when Iodine was introduced, or whatever... At best, a "protip" everyone could've discovered himself through a few minutes of Googling.

My trick is usually just to setup a socks5 tunnel to a remote machine running OpenSSH. The nice thing about this is that you don't have to install anything on your system, and most people have access to a remote Linux/BSD-based server.

Nifty one-liner to set it properly up: "ssh user@host -D 8080". Then you just point your system wide proxy to localhost:8080 and magically see all your data be tunneled.

A more interesting spin is TCP-over-DNS. Some networks will block TCP but not DNS, so you send all your traffic over DNS.

It's not very efficient, though.

If you have a server somewhere, there's no real limit to the creative ways you can get around network restrictions.

Back in 2005, Google offered "Google Secure Access", a short-lived service to provide secure VPN access across insecure Wi-Fi networks. I'm unsure why Google dropped the service so quickly, but there is still probably a good business opportunity in this space. Business travelers stuck using airports' insecure Wi-Fi and hotels' captive portals might be eager to pay for turnkey VPN tunnels. Like this blog post suggests, you could spin up EC2 proxies as on demand.

* September 2005: Google Secure Access goes beta: http://lifehacker.com/126454/google-secure-access-+-encrypt-...

* October 2005: Google Secure Access shuts down: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/google-secure-access-is-his...

If you want to be even more clever (imo) try out iodine[1]

[1]http://code.kryo.se/iodine/

I use a service called Cloak (https://www.getcloak.com/), which I love and recommend to people all the time. It does something similar, but it automatically detects when you're on an unsecured network and automatically does everything for you.

Highly recommended. The author of the program hangs out on HN sometimes too.

Nifty trick, but some services kill ssh on port 443, and I guess they do so by limiting connection lifetime. In these cases, I find GNU httptunnel very useful.

This is interesting but incomplete. It may not survive to deep packet inspection or rate limiting. Even worse - your only S3 machine could get blacklisted, and I don't see why operators wouldn't share blacklist the way it's done to fight spam.

So my suggestion is to have multiple alternatives instead, as in lines of defense.

First, a simple SSH server also running a socks and a http proxy is useful. Easy to reach and configure - some browser work better with http proxy (or was it sock? Opera only supports one but I can't remember which at the moment)

In the second line, you want to run the SSH server on a nonstandard port as the author does. I suggest multiplexing the port : simply run SSLH on both port 80 and 443, with the patch published on http://rutschle.net/pipermail/sslh/2012-April/000202.html

But that will not look like a standard SSL connection. Even worse, if you use your own certificate - operators could deny all self-signed certificates.

So get stunnel running on port 443 with a "usual" certificate instead, and pass the traffic on port 80 where you'll be happy to have SSLH or whatever you prefer - like Openvpn which can do port sharing or which can be put "behind" stunnel and sslh, so that you will use a standard 443 port, and do a genuine SSL connection on that port. Much better. Have some fun with burst.net - they offer you 2 IP for like $7/month : you can do some routing and give the 2nd IP address to your laptop on the other end of the tunnel. Now that is freedom :-) Every port will be opened in both ways :-)

Still, I do not believe anything of that will be enough to resist to statistical analysis. I've seen interesting tools, but if I down to that I'd better use a standard DNS tunnel (iodine, dns2tcp, ntsx, whatever).

Once again, multiplexing port 53 could be good to have them on different subdomains (you never know which tool you'll have on hand, or can easily recompile on the go) or to run a standard DNS server too (named, maradns, ...).

It will be a good idea to "rate limit" one of them because having too much traffic flow on port 53 to a given IP is something that stands out. (And I have seen DNS tunnels broken by a simple rate limit rule)

I found something interesting to multiplex DNS request in C, which name I don't remember at the moment. If anyone is interested I can dig that up.

Finally, deploy all that setup on at least 2 machines, using different domains and different subnet so that if one of your "lines of defenses" goes down (ie get blacklisted) you can safely move to the next one.

Total time it takes : 2 hours, then you'll always have a way out of a locked connection.

Instead of using an Amazon machine, why not use a low-power ARM device? I have been running a small ARM computer at home for doing sshuttle, iodine, and samba over ssh (with port binding) for the past few weeks and it works very well. I know tcp over tcp is usually not good but it still works quickly for some reason. This costs less than a VM on Amazon and gives you more flexibility.

A nicer sshuttle command for VPN may be: $ ./sshuttle -v --remote=server_USERNAME@serverIP:port_number --dns 0/0

If you sshuttle to your home router you may be able to samba or nfs to the ARM on your home network (using tcp and udp, I think).

Alternatively, SSHFS or something more normal could be used for mounting the ARM filesystem without a VPN but if you want to try Samba over SSH you could try: $ ssh -C -c blowfish -L[host_bind_port]:localhost:445 server_USERNAME@serverIP $ mkdir /Users/username/mount_spot $ mount -t smbfs //server_USERNAME@localhost:[host_bind_port]/server_drive ~/mount_spot

Tools like rsync over SSH and UFTP are also nice for moving large files to and from the ARM server.

I tried making an instructible on this last week but it's kinda poor: http://www.instructables.com/id/Personal-ARM-Cloud-Server/

If you run an openwrt/dd-wrt firmware on your home router you can bounce of it too. Just configure ssh access on it and you have pretty much the same thing.

I've been doing something similar for almost 8 years now. I wrote a Ruby script to do the heavy lifting of tunneling all my TCP traffic through an HTTPS proxy.

It's about 160 lines of code, you can find it at https://github.com/wvdschel/ProxyBash.

I first wrote it to circumvent the firewall at a summer job to be able to connect to IRC, and I recently got it out of the dust to do something similar at my current job. I couldn't use anything pre-existing, because I was on a tightly locked down Windows system. This approach only required some kind of portable Ruby runtime.

Corkscrew does pretty much the same thing, but my script doesn't require an SSH server to run on port 443 and does away with SSH encryption for most connections. The latter can be either a good or a bad thing, depending on your use case.

I know this is a bit different, but maybe you could modify it a bit so you don't need sshuttle?

http://blog.mixu.net/2009/05/05/how-to-watch-hulu-videos-via...

Just make your server listen for ssh on port 80 or 443, and then tunnel away!

You can also configure any OpenSSH Server/Client (v4.3 or greater) into a fully-fledged VPN (as opposed to port tunnelling). Granted there are more steps involved in connection than say, OpenVPN, however it is still relatively simple and you get a nice little VPN.

I'm pretty sure that you could also setup an OpenVPN server. It can be configured to listen over TCP port 443, so it can also get past proxies. It may be a bit more setup on the server-side, but it should be a lot easier on the clients.

Well I'll throw my solution in as well. However, it is only intended for web traffic, nothing else (useful for getting around firewalls, filters, etc..)

I have squid running on a vps, but NOT exposed externally (and it has basic auth). Then just set up an ssh tunnel "ssh -f user@mydomain.com -L 3128:mydomain.com:3128 -N" and now you have a proxy server available on localhost:3128. Then its as simple as pointing a single proxy supporting app, your OS wide proxy settings, etc.. to localhost:3128 with the correct basic auth credentials and you are in business.

I use this on linux and windows (cygwin) every day, works beautifully

Sidestep (http://chetansurpur.com/projects/sidestep/) is a great way to have this automatically happen when you connect to the network.

I use this setup on my laptop (mac specific). I have an ssh server listening on port 443 on a linux machine in the basement of some university somewhere.

.ssh/config

    Host bouncebox
    Port 443

/usr/local/bin/prox

    #!/bin/bash

    if [ $1 == 'off' ]; then
      echo "Disabling Proxy..."
      networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate "Wi-Fi" off
    else 
      echo "Enabling Proxy on port 12345"
      networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy "Wi-Fi" localhost 12345
    fi

Just type `prox; ssh -D 12345 bouncebox`

While it's not as comprehensive as full traffic redirection, I host a shellinabox[1] over HTTPS on my server that I use when SSH is disabled. It's quite convenient when I want a shell from anywhere quickly since there's nothing to setup.

I also have an openvpn for when I want full tunneling, but that takes more time to setup properly.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ (there are quite a lot of others web-based terminals if this one doesn't suit you)

Alternative this is much more sneaky: run an obfuscated tunnel. Most firewalls will allow egress DNS for example, so tunnel your TCP over DNS. This will also allow you to sneak out of pay-for wifi setups like at the airport. http://analogbit.com/software/tcp-over-dns

I've done this with my Windows Home Server. You just turn on VPN, and then on my ThinkPad with WiMax, I have it automatically VPN in whenever I switch antennae. Never have to worry about what content is being restricted, what kind of shaping the hotel wifi is doing, or what snooping fellow coffee-shop goers are engaging in.

Or just run tor and turn on the restrictive/fascist firewall option with ports 80 and 443. No EC2 instance needed...

I long ago learned that effective public wifi means a VPN over SSL/443.

My concern is that this knowledge -- about VPN's, much of the "for dummies" versions using 443 -- is becoming mainstream. Whereupon there will be further escalation.

(As long as it was a niche, it was missed or ignored by many "public wifi" providers.)

You can use the HideMyAss VPN service. I used it to stream the Olympics http://engineerwithoutacause.com/how-to-stream-2012-olympics...

Ah the classic SSH tunnel. I used to use something similar to bypass the blocks in highschool. I used PuTTY to set up an SSH tunnel to my home server and it would host a local proxy port for the browser to use.

Megabus isn't blocking traffic, their Wi-Fi is cellular-based and being shared with everyone else on the bus. Therefore; slow and crappy.

This is a great trick. I've done it with my home server with great success, using an EC2 server is an even better solution.

Why not just do port forwarding from port 80 to the ssh port (forget the number) on your home router/Linux gateway?

`ssh -D 1337 me@mysite.me` <-- Does dynamic port forwarding (SOCKS proxy)...

This won't work with a variety of even quasi intelligent filters. In fact, it's shameful that this works anywhere near as much as it does.

This is way overkill anyway.

Change the SSHD port (since the filters are naive enough to just whitelist ports apparently), then run `ssh -D 8080 user@ec2-instance:80` and voila, you have a SOCKS proxy that will proxy any traffic, including DNS requests. (and good OSes will easily allow you to utilize that proxy system wide)