[Noisebridge-discuss] How do you secure your public wifi usage?

[Sai Emrys]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 6:23 PM, Jonathan Lassoff <jof at thejof.com> wrote:
> Adium, at least, follows the system wide SOCKS proxy settings if set.
> This is at least one way to give a hint to programs that use it on OSX.

Does it do so for DNS queries (or use fixed IPs and thus moot the need to)?

When I tried just setting a system SOCKS proxy, I noticed in iftop
that a lot of traffic was still ignoring it.

> Alternatively under Linux, one can use tsocks as a wrapper around each
> application you run. It uses the dynamic linker to map calls to
> connect() to actually connect through a SOCKS proxy.

Yeah, I looked at that. But it's a pain in the ass, and you have to
set it up specially for each program.

Proxifier just automatically patches *all* traffic through the proxy
per your rules.

Basically IMO any solution that doesn't do that - anything that
requires per-item setup - is bad for security, because it allows human
error. I know that I certainly don't trust myself not to miss
something…

This way the worst case reset scenario is I kill ssh, restart it, and
maybe restart proxifier. With tsocks you'd have to potentially do so
for every single program.

FWIW though, there is tsocks for mac.

> Even better would be an encrypted IP tunnel from ones host to whichever
> proxy server you'd normally use. ssh -w could work.

Proxifier handles proxy chaining. :-)

- Sai