Introduction

A mobile user relying on public Internet access has to accept certain inherent risks. Unscrupulous individuals can intercept and record your traffic, or even interpose themselves into the session, taking the place of any party. Your traffic can also be blocked or filtered at will, with little notice.

While these risks can never truly be mitigated, measures can be taken that reduce the potential for harm. This article will show you how to use two applications, Hamachi and Squid, to set up a secure connection to a web proxy that can be used for secure web browsing no matter where you are.

Figure 1: In-the-clear browsing can be monitored

Figure 1 is a simplified diagram of normal Internet traffic, in this case HTTP. A user’s Internet browser sends a request for data to a web server, which then replies with the data requested. The Eavesdropper, an individual who gains access to the session traffic, is able to obtain passwords transmitted in plaintext, all without the knowledge or consent of the user.

If a wired connection is used, the Eavesdropper must have physical access to the network being used. A wireless network, however, such as a public Wi-Fi Hotspot can be monitored from afar with no physical connection.

Today, most e-commerce sites rely on SSL to encrypt passwords. But there are still many sites in use (forums and blogs being the most prevalent) that provide easy pickings for anyone with basic competency in packet sniffing. Although it would be ideal to have every site engage in secure communications with its users, the reality is that the responsibility of safeguarding credentials is too often placed squarely on the user.

If a secure session cannot be established between a site and user, the next best solution is to secure at least part of the connection. This is illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Secure connection to a Proxy server

Figure 2 illustrates the data flow of a user relying on VPN to traverse an untrusted network. Instead of querying the web server directly (as in Figure 1), the Internet browser forwards the request to a proxy server, which then conducts a session with the web server on the client’s behalf.

Communication between the client and proxy (which should be all the HTTP traffic) is routed through the tunnel established by VPN software (Hamachi). Since this tunnel encrypts traffic passing through it, Eavesdropper is unable to obtain any plaintext data. Without the ability to read traffic, the risk of someone hijacking the session is sharply reduced, resulting in an overall improvement in security.

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