Now that I own a laptop, I’ve found myself scouting out public WiFi on a regular basis.  Coffee shops, bookstores, fastfood joints, all seem to have WiFi these days.  But if you’ve spent any time reading up on Computer Security, you know that free public WiFi can be dangerous.  It’s really easy to sniff the traffic in the clear and pull out passwords and other information.  The main solution you hear about is "Use a VPN".

VPN’s used to be in the realm of big dedicated hardware from folks like Cisco.  However, in recent times it’s become more and more common. I spent some of last week setting up openVPN, an open source VPN Client & Server.  Using OpenVPN, I can tunnel all of my traffic through a secure and encrypted link to a trusted server, thwarting anyone attempting to sniff the connection.  It’s similar to SSH Tunneling, however it tunnels everything on my machine without manually having to set up a bunch of tunnels.

Using the documentation on their site ( The HOWTO ) I was able to get the server loaded on a RedHat Linux box without much trouble using the provided "server.conf" as a template.  Then I setup "Tunnelblick" on my Macbook for a client, and tada! It works beautifully.  The one change I had to make on the server was to add :

         push "redirect-gateway def1"

to the server.conf, to force it to route all data through the VPN.  Without this, it only routes traffic on the local subnet (10.0.x.x by default).

With it working on my laptop, I decided to set it up on my wife’s Windows laptop.  I was able to install the windows client from OpenVPN.net and use almost the same client.conf as i used (Just changed the path to the keys & certificates), and it works like a charm.

So, if you have a remote server (At your home, a remote webserver, etc) and some time to set it up, I highly recommend it. It adds alot of much-needed security when using a public WiFi point. [tag:openvpn][tag:wifi][tag:security]

I apologize if this is less than coherent.  I’m overcoming a stomach virus.

Be Sociable, Share!