VNC is considered to be an insecure protocol. The password is sent using fairly weak encryption, and the rest of the session is not encrypted at all. For that reason, when using VNC over an untrusted network or internet, I recommend you tunnel it over SSH.

To forward VNC port 5900 on localhost to remote host port 5900

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 vncserver

If your ssh server is listening on other port like: 222

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 vncserver -p 222

The same procedure can be done on a window$ machine using putty Read the rest of this entry »

An SSH tunnel (sometimes referred to as a VPN) is an encrypted network tunnel created through an SSH connection. SSH is frequently used to tunnel insecure traffic over the Internet in a secure way. For example, if you were to check your webmail over the internet your username and password would be send in clear text format, meaning that anyone with a sniffer and using ARP poisoning techniques could intercept your credentials. To browse the internet securely, one can establish an SSH tunnel that routes all HTTP traffic to the ssh server inside an SSH-encrypted connection. Even though the HTTP traffic itself is insecure, because it travels within an encrypted connection it becomes secure.

In order to create an SSH tunnel, the SSH client is configured to forward a specified remote port and IP address (that is accessible on the SSH server) to a port on the local machine. Once the SSH connection has been established, the user can connect to the specified local port to access the network services that would otherwise be available only at the remote IP address and port. For this tutorial I would be setting up SSH server in Ubuntu, and the client pc a windows xp using Internet Explorer as the browser, I know… not the best OS and browser, but I think that’s what most people use.

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