howto bypass the corporate firewall
This article provides a brief guide on circumventing the corporate firewall using an SSL tunnel. Why bother? Sometimes it blocks legitimate resources I need to access, and it is slow. Requesting a whitelist for each domain individually is time-consuming, so I decided to explore alternative methods. Most corporate firewalls are designed to be cost-effective, not maximally efficient. To bypass the restrictions, we could use a simple SSH tunnel wrapped inside the HTTPS session to the Internet server. Why do we use SSH inside the SSL tunnel? Some corporate firewalls perform man-in-the-middle attack by providing custom certificates installed on company computers, so that browsers would not complain about an untrusted certificate in the chain. Correctly configured SSH with public key authentication is used to mitigate the man-in-the-middle on the corporate side.