The SSH protocol has a unique feature of tunneling other protocols and encrypting them. This article will show you how to use the popular terminal emulator PuTTY to create a SSH tunnel to pass VNC traffic which is normally unencrypted. This is just an example of tunneling VNC traffic through PuTTY you can tunnel almost any traffic (eg HTTP, FTP) by changing port numbers. First I will show you how this is done through the GUI and then by using command line parameters of PuTTY which are very similar to the “ssh” command in Linux. This article assumes that a VNC server software has already been installed on the target Linux computer and a VNC session has been created.Continue Reading…
Configure Cisco Routers for SSH Access
In the previous article we how to configure Cisco routers and switches for telnet access and in this article we’ll see how to do the same with SSH. SSH is always preferred because it is very much secure than telnet. A quick intro on SSH, it expands to Secure Shell, listens on port 22, uses public key cryptography technique for encryption. Because SSH uses keys we need to generate one on the router. To connect using SSH from a windows system a third party software such as putty us needed, but for Linux users a SSH client is built into all distributions.Continue Reading…
SSH verify host public key
Usually when you connect to a computer via SSH for the first time you might see a message stating “The authenticity of the host can’t be established Are you sure you want to continue connecting ?” even if you blindly give yes it has a lot of meaning in it. If you’re accessing your workplace computer through SSH just by entering ssh server.workplace.com you can’t be sure the connection is between you and your workplace server. A malicious user tampering with your internet connection can also create a man-in-the-middle attack and find out your Linux user account password. By importing the public key of the host to which you’re connecting you can be sure you’re “talking” to the right person.Continue Reading…
SSH configure key based authentication
Configure key based authentication in SSH to allow users to login without entering their password. Key based authentication uses public key cryptography to make sure only the owner of the correct private pair logs in through SSH. If the user logs in using password based authentication anyone knowing that user’s password can login. But with key based authentication only the person possessing the correct private key pair for the public key located on the SSH server can login. To add more security you can even add a passphrase to the SSH key.Continue Reading…
