the life and times of endenizen » HOWTO: Secure Browsing with PuTTY and Firefox

The government is watching you! Maybe not, but your boss is watching you! Aw heck, *someone* is watching you! The internet isn’t a safe place so why not protect your privacy while you’re browsing the www. With these simple steps, you can create a secure “tunnel” between the computer you’re using and a remote server. Your data will be encrypted before being passed through the tunnel to prevent anyone from seeing (or restricting) your internet browsing. This technique is useful if certain websites are blocked (typical of some schools) or if you just don’t want your privacy thrown out the window as your boss monitors every website you visit. Besides, you’re devoted to your job and wouldn’t dare visit sites like Slashdot, BoingBoing or FARK on company time.

Note: For certain software setups and configurations, this can tend to be a very involved process. For this guide, I’ll be using a feature specific to PuTTY. This may work with other SSH software but I make no guarantees, though you should be able to find other solutions easily with Google.

The process:

1. Get PuTTY.
2. Optional: If you’re adding this rule to a previously saved session, make sure to select that session and hit load before you continue.
3. Click on “Tunnels” in the options list and enter 1080 for the source port (1080 is the “official” SOCKS port, though you can choose a different one if you so desire). Click the Dynamic radio button and hit Add.

4. Optional: Scroll back up to the Session options and save the session.
5. Make sure the Host Name (or IP) is set correctly in the Session options and click Open.
6. When you login, you should have a tunnel between your computer and the server you connected to (If it doesn’t work, make sure you entered all of the information correctly). Now we have to configure Firefox to work with our newly created tunnel.
7. Open up Firefox and click Tools->Options. Click on Connection Settings at the bottom of the panel.
8. Select “Manual proxy configuration”, type in 127.0.0.1 for the SOCKS Host and put in 1080 (where 1080 is the port you used in the PuTTY tunnel).

That’s it! You should now be able to browse the internet through the tunnel. To make sure it’s working visit www.whatismyip.com and you should see the ip of the server you created the tunnel to. If you have any questions about this HOWTO, please post them below and I’ll respond as best I can.