PUBLIC MARKS with tags standard & secure

SSH has numerous uses beyond just logging into a remote system. In particular, SSH allows you to forward ports from one machine to another, tunnelling traffic through the secure SSH connection. This provides a convenient means of accessing a service hosted behind a firewall, or one blocked by an outgoing firewall. However, forwarding an individual port still requires you to change where your program connects, telling it to use a non-standard port on localhost rather than the standard port on the remote machine, and it requires a separate port forward for each machine you want to access. Dynamic port forwarding via SOCKS provides a more convenient alternative. The examples in this article assume that you reside behind a restrictive firewall which does not allow outgoing SMTP connections except to a designated mail server. You want to connect to a different mail server, mail.example.net, on port 25. You have an SSH account on a machine shell.example.org, which does not reside within the restrictive firewall and can thus access port 25 on mail.example.net.

An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.