Securing your Android in open Wi-Fi networks

A couple months ago, our partner Jose Vila talked about the power of SSH tunnels. He showed how we can avoid firewalls and bypass those tricky filters using tunnelled traffic.

Today, I’m going to show you a different approach.

Nowadays, it is a dangerous thing to connect your smartphone unprotected to a free Wi-Fi. It is quite common that somebody is sniffing the traffic or you suffer an ARP poison attack. Then how can I be secure on a wifi network? Once again, with SSH tunnels. And how to build SSH tunnels with my Android? With SSH Tunnel.

If you want to enjoy all capabilities, please note you will need to root your device. The reason is that SSH Tunnel needs to modify the firewall parameters in order to redirect all the traffic. The configuration task is very easy, you just need to set the Host, User and Password, and then mark the “Use socks proxy” and “Global Proxy” options.

The last step is to activate the Tunnel Switch and we are done!

When SSH Tunnel connects to our Host and establish the connection, we are free to navigate “The Internets” through a public and insecure wifi.