When traveling, you may come across wireless hotspots where you have to pay before you can send TCP packets to arbitrary destinations the internet. However, it is frequently the case that you can send ping (ICMP echo) packets to any host on the internet. This is like locking the front door and leaving the window open, because ICMP allows echo packets and their replies to carry payloads. You can therefore use ICMP as a substrate for another channel of communication. ptunnel is a tool which takes a TCP connection and tunnels it over ICMP.
In this post I assume that you want to tunnel an SSH connection over ICMP. Not only is SSH a common application, you can take other channels and tunnel them over SSH (for example, an HTTP proxy, so that you can browse the web).
You will need to install ptunnel on two hosts: the proxy (any well-known host on the internet) and your client (typically, the laptop you are taking with you). On Debian/Ubuntu, this can be done with apt-get install ptunnel.
On the proxy, do the following:
PROXY$ sudo ptunnel -x PASSWORDreplacing PASSWORD with a password of your choice.
On the client, do the following:
CLIENT$ sudo ptunnel -p nameofproxy.domainname.com -lp 6789 -da localhost -dp 22 -c wlan0 -x PASSWORDReplace the options with (respectively) the address of the proxy, a port number of your choice, the name and port of the server you wish to connect to (as seen by the proxy; in this case we assume that the SSH server is on the proxy itself), the network interface you are using, and the password you selected.
Then, connect via SSH using the port you specified in the previous part:
CLIENT$ ssh -p 6789 localhostUsing the web over your tunnel
SSH can be easily configured to act as a web proxy and forward all HTTP requests over the line. To do this, replace the above ssh invocation with the following:
CLIENT$ ssh -p 6789 -D 8080 localhostThen, configure your web browser to use the proxy you've just created. In Firefox, for example: Preferences/Options; Advanced tab; Network tab; Settings; Manual proxy configuration; SOCKS host: localhost; port: 8080.
I complied ptunnel on both ubuntu and osx. i am using ubuntu as the server, and osx as my client. i am testing it on a local network right now, and these are the commands i am using:
ReplyDeleteserver:
sudo ptunnel
client:
sudo ./ptunnel -p 192.168.123.109 -lp 8000 -da localhost -dp 22
client (2nd terminal)
ssh -p 8000 7777 localhost
and then it wants Andrew@localhost's password. i don't know what that means, but i tried my login password and it didn't work :(
nvm, i needed to specify my user name. osx was using Andrew and ubuntu was using andrew
ReplyDeleteSo if i need to use a ping tunnel i have to have it downloaded on my computer and a host. what do u mean by a host?
ReplyDeletegonna try it
ReplyDelete