sshuttle 0.75

Client side Requirements

• sudo, or logged in as root on your client machine. (The server doesn’t need admin access.)

• Python 2.7 or Python 3.5.

Server side Requirements

Python 2.7 or Python 3.5.

Additional Suggested Software

• You may want to use autossh, available in various package management systems

Additional information for TPROXY

TPROXY is the only method that supports full support of IPv6 and UDP.

Full UDP or DNS support with the TPROXY method requires the recvmsg() syscall. This is not available in Python 2.7, however is in Python 3.5 and later.

• For Python 2.7, you need PyXAPI, available here: http://www.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr/~ylg/PyXAPI/

There are some things you need to consider for TPROXY to work:

• The following commands need to be run first as root. This only needs to be done once after booting up:

  ip route add local default dev lo table 100
  ip rule add fwmark 1 lookup 100
  ip -6 route add local default dev lo table 100
  ip -6 rule add fwmark 1 lookup 100

• The –auto-nets feature does not detect IPv6 routes automatically. Add IPv6 routes manually. e.g. by adding ‘::/0’ to the end of the command line.

• The client needs to be run as root. e.g.:

  sudo SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" $HOME/tree/sshuttle.tproxy/sshuttle  --method=tproxy ...

• You may need to exclude the IP address of the server you are connecting to. Otherwise sshuttle may attempt to intercept the ssh packets, which will not work. Use the –exclude parameter for this.

• Similarly, UDP return packets (including DNS) could get intercepted and bounced back. This is the case if you have a broad subnet such as 0.0.0.0/0 or ::/0 that includes the IP address of the client. Use the –exclude parameter for this.

• You do need the –method=tproxy parameter, as above.

• The routes for the outgoing packets must already exist. For example, if your connection does not have IPv6 support, no IPv6 routes will exist, IPv6 packets will not be generated and sshuttle cannot intercept them:

  telnet -6 www.google.com 80
  Trying 2404:6800:4001:805::1010...
  telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Network is unreachable

  Add some dummy routes to external interfaces. Make sure they get removed however after sshuttle exits.

Obtaining sshuttle

• From PyPI:

  pip install sshuttle

• Clone:

  git clone https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle.git
  ./setup.py install

Usage

• Forward all traffic:

  sshuttle -r username@sshserver 0.0.0.0/0 -vv

• By default sshuttle will automatically choose a method to use. Override with the –method= parameter.

• There is a shortcut for 0.0.0.0/0 for those that value their wrists:

  sshuttle -r username@sshserver 0/0 -vv

• If you would also like your DNS queries to be proxied through the DNS server of the server you are connect to:

  sshuttle --dns -vvr username@sshserver 0/0

  The above is probably what you want to use to prevent local network attacks such as Firesheep and friends.

(You may be prompted for one or more passwords; first, the local password to become root using sudo, and then the remote ssh password. Or you might have sudo and ssh set up to not require passwords, in which case you won’t be prompted at all.)

Usage Notes

That’s it! Now your local machine can access the remote network as if you were right there. And if your “client” machine is a router, everyone on your local network can make connections to your remote network.

You don’t need to install sshuttle on the remote server; the remote server just needs to have python available. sshuttle will automatically upload and run its source code to the remote python interpreter.

This creates a transparent proxy server on your local machine for all IP addresses that match 0.0.0.0/0. (You can use more specific IP addresses if you want; use any number of IP addresses or subnets to change which addresses get proxied. Using 0.0.0.0/0 proxies everything, which is interesting if you don’t trust the people on your local network.)

Any TCP session you initiate to one of the proxied IP addresses will be captured by sshuttle and sent over an ssh session to the remote copy of sshuttle, which will then regenerate the connection on that end, and funnel the data back and forth through ssh.

Fun, right? A poor man’s instant VPN, and you don’t even have to have admin access on the server.

Support

Mailing list:

• Subscribe by sending a message to <sshuttle+subscribe@googlegroups.com>

• List archives are at: http://groups.google.com/group/sshuttle

Issue tracker and pull requests at github:

• https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

Theory of Operation

sshuttle is not exactly a VPN, and not exactly port forwarding. It’s kind of both, and kind of neither.

It’s like a VPN, since it can forward every port on an entire network, not just ports you specify. Conveniently, it lets you use the “real” IP addresses of each host rather than faking port numbers on localhost.

On the other hand, the way it works is more like ssh port forwarding than a VPN. Normally, a VPN forwards your data one packet at a time, and doesn’t care about individual connections; ie. it’s “stateless” with respect to the traffic. sshuttle is the opposite of stateless; it tracks every single connection.

You could compare sshuttle to something like the old Slirp program, which was a userspace TCP/IP implementation that did something similar. But it operated on a packet-by-packet basis on the client side, reassembling the packets on the server side. That worked okay back in the “real live serial port” days, because serial ports had predictable latency and buffering.

But you can’t safely just forward TCP packets over a TCP session (like ssh), because TCP’s performance depends fundamentally on packet loss; it must experience packet loss in order to know when to slow down! At the same time, the outer TCP session (ssh, in this case) is a reliable transport, which means that what you forward through the tunnel never experiences packet loss. The ssh session itself experiences packet loss, of course, but TCP fixes it up and ssh (and thus you) never know the difference. But neither does your inner TCP session, and extremely screwy performance ensues.

sshuttle assembles the TCP stream locally, multiplexes it statefully over an ssh session, and disassembles it back into packets at the other end. So it never ends up doing TCP-over-TCP. It’s just data-over-TCP, which is safe.

Useless Trivia

This section written by Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>.

Back in 1998 (12 years ago! Yikes!), I released the first version of Tunnel Vision, a semi-intelligent VPN client for Linux. Unfortunately, I made two big mistakes: I implemented the key exchange myself (oops), and I ended up doing TCP-over-TCP (double oops). The resulting program worked okay - and people used it for years - but the performance was always a bit funny. And nobody ever found any security flaws in my key exchange, either, but that doesn’t mean anything. :)

The same year, dcoombs and I also released Fast Forward, a proxy server supporting transparent proxying. Among other things, we used it for automatically splitting traffic across more than one Internet connection (a tool we called “Double Vision”).

I was still in university at the time. A couple years after that, one of my professors was working with some graduate students on the technology that would eventually become Slipstream Internet Acceleration. He asked me to do a contract for him to build an initial prototype of a transparent proxy server for mobile networks. The idea was similar to sshuttle: if you reassemble and then disassemble the TCP packets, you can reduce latency and improve performance vs. just forwarding the packets over a plain VPN or mobile network. (It’s unlikely that any of my code has persisted in the Slipstream product today, but the concept is still pretty cool. I’m still horrified that people use plain TCP on complex mobile networks with crazily variable latency, for which it was never really intended.)

That project I did for Slipstream was what first gave me the idea to merge the concepts of Fast Forward, Double Vision, and Tunnel Vision into a single program that was the best of all worlds. And here we are, at last, 10 years later. You’re welcome.