Joseph Piché, Web development professional with expertise in PHP, MySQL query optimization, Ajax, and XHTML.

Anonymity and privacy are on everyone’s lips. But how do the policies put in place at businesses, colleges, public wifi areas, or even ISPs affect users? In order to obtain internet access, a user may be forced to have all traffic logged and inspected. Also, many religious institutions put up firewalls such as DansGuardian to protect user’s from pornography. But in the age of privacy how does someone remain anonymous when restrictions like these are put in place?

There are two primary ways to bypass a firewall. The first is simple and can be easily performed on any computer. While the second is a bit more complicated, it is also more secure.

1. The Secure Proxy

With the secure proxy, the user will use their web browser to go to a secured website that, instead of them, will gather the information they are wanting. For example, if I am behind a firewall that blocks me from news.google.com, then I would go to a secure proxy—like Proxify.com—and tell it to go to the website for me. The secure proxy would protect and secure the information I am sending to news.google.com and keep me anonymous. A few other secure proxies are: Dtunnel.com and amgstealth.com, but Proxy.org is a good resource for proxy listings. And remember, the key is that the proxy is secure; make sure the address is prefixed by ‘https://’ because if not, your traffic might be tracked.

The secure proxy has it’s disadvantages though. While a proxy will allow you to browse a website seamlessly, it might be a little bothersome. Many secure proxies thrive on ads for making money and the ones that don’t will require you to pay. Also, new administration technology is always being developed, and as scary as it sounds, it might not be long before secure browser sessions can be invaded.

2. SSH Tunnel

Remaining anonymous online is starting to become a challenge, but the SSH tunnel is a tried and true way to secure your traffic and keep you anonymous. SSH, or Secure Shell, is a technology that is often used by system administrators to remotely login to computers in order to manage them. However, SSH is now commonplace on almost all non-Windows operating systems and is being used more and more by users for various tasks, like secure file transfer.

The SSH tunnel is a simple extension of a normal SSH connection. While a normal SSH connection will only give the user the ability to execute commands on the remote computer, setting up the connection as a tunnel will also allow internet traffic to be transfered through the connection. As in the case above, if I set up a tunnel to a computer outside the firewall, I can use that tunnel to silently transfer my request for news.google.com through the firewall. An system administrator logging web traffic would not see the request for the website or the receipt of the data.

For a specific example, in order to login to remote computer “alpha” as user “fred”, one might type the command:

$ ssh fred@alpha

However, if the user was to set up a tunnel with the connection, the command might be:

$ ssh -D 7777 fred@alpha

Thus creating a “local” proxy on port 7777 within the computer that the web browser would need to connect to. At that point all traffic would securely and anonymously pass through the firewall.

As with a secure proxy, setting up a SSH tunnel also has it’s hindrances. First, a Windows user might have great difficulty setting up a tunnel since SSH technology is not built into Windows; however, utilities such as PuTTY help in this process. Second, setting up a SSH tunnel requires access to a remote computer capable of handling SSH requests. If a user does have access to this though, the problem is still presented that the traffic might be logged from the remote computer. Secure proxies are built to provide anonymity, but a SSH tunnel is a private connection, and although the contents being passing in the connection cannot be seen, the connection itself might be traced. Overcoming the limitations of a SSH tunnel might be a simple as using technologies such as Tor—a network of secure connections built for anonymity and privacy, freely available for anyone to use.

Dealing with anonymity and privacy must be done with care. As remaining anonymous online becomes easier for the user, the job of system administration becomes increasingly difficult. Protecting kids from pornography and profanity, ensuring accuracy of information, or validation someone’s identification even for purposes of banking are all tasks that, due to anonymity, become painfully difficult. Privacy and anonymity are important freedoms, but we must remember that this freedom carries with it the responsibly to not abuse it.

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