We can set up a socks proxy on top of a SSH tunnel. Besides the common proxy functions, such as web browsing, the proxy on top of SSH tunnel also ensures the security between the browser and the proxy server (the SSH server). In this post, we introduce and explain how to set up a proxy over SSH tunnel and the mechanism of it.
A simple example
Let’s start with a simple example. We can access a sshd server sshd_server and we want to use it as a socks5 proxy server. It is simple by using ssh:
$ ssh -D 8080 username@sshd_server
After that, set the browser such as firefox’s proxy option to use socks5 proxy 127.0.0.1:8080. That’s it!
Then, check whether your IP is from the proxy from the websites’ view: Who am I.