Wireless Hacks

Squid Proxy over SSH

Secure your web traffic from prying eyes—and improve performance in the process.

squid is normally used as an HTTP-accelerator. It is a large, well-managed, and full-featured caching HTTP proxy that is finding its way into many commercial web platforms. Since it performs all of its magic on a single TCP port, it is an ideal candidate for use with an SSH tunnel. This not only helps to secure your web browser when using wireless networks, but also potentially makes your browser run even faster. Best of all, squid is open source and freely available from http://www.squid-cache.org/.

First, choose a server on which to host your squid cache. Typically, this will be a Linux or BSD machine on your local wired network—although squid also runs in Windows, under Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). You want to have a fast connection to your cache, so choosing a squid cache at the other end of a dial-up connection is probably a bad idea (unless you enjoy simulating what the Internet was like in 1995). On a home network, this is typically the same machine you use as a firewall or DNS server. Fortunately, squid isn’t very demanding when it supports only a few simultaneous users, so it can happily share a box that runs other services.

It is beyond the scope of this hack to include full squid installation instructions, but configuration isn’t especially difficult. Just be sure to check your access rules and set a password for the management interface. If you have trouble getting ...