Doing secure tunneling in the VNC free edition

[S. I. Becker]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Favaro" <jfavaro "at" tin.it>
To: <vnc-list "at" realvnc.com>
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 1:30 PM
Subject: Doing secure tunneling in the VNC free edition


> The discussion on being hacked during VNC sessions and solving it with 
> secure tunneling prompted me to try to find out how to do it (with the 
> free version). I'm using Windows XP. I couldn't really figure it out. I 
> could only find OpenSSH, which is Unix, and there is Putty, which is 
> Windows but I couldn't understand whether and how that is used in VNC. I 
> wasn't able to find a how-to guide in the VNC documentation -- but I'll 
> probably discover I wasn't looking in the right places.
>
> Is there somebody here who has actually done it in this context and can 
> give me a list of steps to do? Thanks for any guidance here.
>

Yes, I've set up VNC servers on windows, with an ssh server to do the 
security.  The ssh server bit is done through Cygwin, which does take a 
while to install.  The following website was _incredibly_ useful in getting 
the whole thing set up:

http://pigtail.net/LRP/vnc/

An added benefit of doing it via ssh is that you can then close the standard 
VNC ports to the outside world on your firewall and just have the ssh port 
(22) open.  Then crackers looking for a computer with open VNC ports open 
will ignore you.

No info that I could give you would be anywhere near as good as the above.

Stewart