Setup a Firefox Proxy using PuTTY

Wednesday, 07 May 2008 08:51
Last Updated Wednesday, 07 May 2008 09:31

This is a great way to secure your web browsing and hide your identity using two free pieces of software. This is very usefull when using public WiFi and don't want anybody snooping on you.

Here is what you will need:

PuTTY loaded on your local machine
Remote host running OpenSSH (e.g. Linux box at home)
Firefox (obviously)

Configure PuTTY

Start up PuTTY and setup an SSH connection to the remote host. This part is pretty straight forward. But the important part is setting up this connection to allow us to tunnel through it. Using the left hand menu in PuTTY, drill down into Connection->SSH->Tunnels. Here enter a Destination (I used 9853) and select 'Dynamic' and click the 'Add' button. That's it!

Now go back to the sessions menu, give your new connection a name and click save. Now connect and login as normal. This connection must always be open when you want to use the proxy with Firefox.

Configure Firefox

Now we need to setup Firefox to use the SSH tunnel we just created. To do this, open the options dialog in Firefox and go to the Advanced button. Under the network tab click on settings. Using the image on the right as a guide, configure a SOCKS proxy. Choose 'Manual Configuration'. Under the SOCKS Host enter 127.0.0.1, and for the port use the destination port you entered when setting up PuTTY, in this case 9853. Make sure SOCKS v5 is selected and click OK.

Give it a Test Run

At this point, you should have a fully working proxy setup using an SSH tunnel. To test this, make sure you are logged in with PuTTY to the remote host, and using firefox go to www.whatismyip.com. You should see the IP address of you the remote SSH host. If not, double check your settings.

Note: You may want to take a look at a firefox extension called FoxyProxy. This allows you to setup a proxy using the same settings outlined above, but with many more options. For instance, you can easily turn the proxy on and off and set it up so the proxy is only used when connection to certain websites.