4. Secure solution: piercing using ssh

4.1 Principle

Let's assume that your site administrator allows transparent TCP connections to some port on some remote machine, (be it the standard SSH port 22, or an alternate destination port, like the HTTP port 80 or whatever), or that you somehow managed to get some port in one side of the firewall to get redirected to a port on the other side (using httptunnel, mailtunnel, icmptunnel, some tunnel over telnet, or whatelse).

Then, you can run an sshd on the remote port, and connect to it with an ssh on the local port. On both sides of the ssh connection, you run IP emulators (pppd), and there you have your VPN, Virtual Public Network, that circumvents the stupid firewall limitations, with the added bonus of being encrypted for privacy (beware: the firewall administrator still knows the other end of the tunnel, and whatever authentication information you might have sent before to run ssh).

The exact same technology can be used to build a VPN, Virtual Private Network, whereby you securely join physical sites into a one logical network without sacrificing security with respect to the transport network between the sites.

4.2 A sample session

Below is a sample session to integrate in a shell script (it assumes sh/bash syntax; YMMV).

Be sure to edit this into a script with the right values for your needs. Use option -p for ssh to try another port than port 22 (but then, be sure to run sshd on same port). You can use slirp on the remote end, if you are not root there, or simply want to screen your local network from outbound connections.

Automatic reconnection is left as an exercise to the reader.

REMOTE_ACCOUNT=root@remote.fqdn.tld
REMOTE_PPPD="pppd ipcp-accept-local ipcp-accept-remote"
LOCAL_PPPD="pppd silent 192.168.0.1:192.168.0.2"
$LOCAL_PPPD pty "ssh -t $REMOTE_ACCOUNT $REMOTE_PPPD"