How to create SSH SOCKS proxy

SSH SOCKS proxy is one of the way to have a secure tunnel for web browsing. It’s comes handy when we need to do secure browsing in a public network such as in a public WiFi environment, as the traffic between our host and the proxy is encrypted .

For this to work, we need to have an SSH server somewhere that we want to tunnel our traffic to, and an SSH client at our host.

Creating an SSH SOCKS tunnel is as simple as running the following command;

$ ssh -D 8080 user@host

The following command assumes we have a user account with the username user at the server with the address proxy-address, and 8080 is our local port to be used for the tunnel.

The next step is to configure your applications to use the proxy you have just created.