Tech Support Forum - View Single Post - Some questions about VNCing through an SSH tunnel

BillBobJoe8978 · 04-17-2009, 03:28 PM

Recently my friend showed me some programs that he uses to connect to his computer at his house remotely. It all seemed fine until he told me that someone remotely connected to his computer and started running commands. I assume that whoever connected sniffed his credentials since I read that VNC itself has low level encryption. So before I continued use of it I looked for a more secure way to remotely connect and encrypt my session so that my credentials could not be detected and discovered VNCing through an SSH tunnel. I have RealVNC server and openSSH running on my home computer and use Putty to connect on the remote machine. I followed these directions and had my friend connect to my computer successfully. The tutorial said that if he closed out his connection to my SSH server the VNC connection should also stop, which it did. I don't really understand some of the directions in the tutorial about port forwarding. It says to put the computers IP address that has the SSH server running and the port it's supposed to allow connections on for Host Name and port in the session tab in Putty. Then under the SSH tab > tunnels it says to add 127.0.0.1:x (x being the port that the VNC server is allowing connections on) for the add new forwarded port. Then the tutorial says to point the VNC viewer to 127.0.0.1:x for the connection. So is it basically creating an SSH tunnel between the remote computer and my computer and then forwarding all data to the port I have my VNC server listening on from 127.0.0.1 on the remote computer or my computer? I don't know all that much about SSH or port forwarding so forgive me if I've made any mistakes in my explanation.

Thanks in advance.

04-17-2009, 03:28 PM	#1 (permalink)
BillBobJoe8978 Registered User Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: Michigan Posts: 15 OS: Windows XP Service Pack 3	Some questions about VNCing through an SSH tunnel Recently my friend showed me some programs that he uses to connect to his computer at his house remotely. It all seemed fine until he told me that someone remotely connected to his computer and started running commands. I assume that whoever connected sniffed his credentials since I read that VNC itself has low level encryption. So before I continued use of it I looked for a more secure way to remotely connect and encrypt my session so that my credentials could not be detected and discovered VNCing through an SSH tunnel. I have RealVNC server and openSSH running on my home computer and use Putty to connect on the remote machine. I followed these directions and had my friend connect to my computer successfully. The tutorial said that if he closed out his connection to my SSH server the VNC connection should also stop, which it did. I don't really understand some of the directions in the tutorial about port forwarding. It says to put the computers IP address that has the SSH server running and the port it's supposed to allow connections on for Host Name and port in the session tab in Putty. Then under the SSH tab > tunnels it says to add 127.0.0.1:x (x being the port that the VNC server is allowing connections on) for the add new forwarded port. Then the tutorial says to point the VNC viewer to 127.0.0.1:x for the connection. So is it basically creating an SSH tunnel between the remote computer and my computer and then forwarding all data to the port I have my VNC server listening on from 127.0.0.1 on the remote computer or my computer? I don't know all that much about SSH or port forwarding so forgive me if I've made any mistakes in my explanation. Thanks in advance.