Anonymizer Secure Tunneling

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Anonymizer Premium Surfing protects you by acting as an intermediary between you and the sites you visit. It prevents the sites you view from identifying you, tracking you, or otherwise invading your right to privacy and anonymity. Premium Surfing also includes URL Encryption™, a feature which protects you from the basic forms of logging employed by ISPs and other computers between you and our servers.

This level of protection is sufficient for many of our users. However, some users require a higher level of security or the ability to encrypt their mail and news traffic. Anonymizer Secure Tunneling allows you to surf the web and send email and news over a highly secure "tunnel" from your computer to our servers.

Secure Shell (SSH) is a program used for making a secure connection between two computers. It encrypts all data sent between the two machines so that no one can gain access to the information while it is in transit. The Secure Shell program allows you to "Port Forward" all of your Internet traffic.

Specific types of Internet traffic are assigned to specific "ports" on computers connected to the Internet. For instance, your web surfing requests are sent to port 80 of the remote site's machine, your requests to fetch mail are usually made on port 110, and your outgoing mail is sent on port 25. SSH creates an encrypted connection on port 22. Using SSH software, you can transfer all of your web, news and email traffic to your secure connection on port 22. This method is known as "Port Forwarding."

This creates several levels of protection. Normally a person who is monitoring you can tell what you are doing based on the port you use to connect to remote machines. If that person sees a connection on port 110 then they know that you are getting your incoming mail. With SSH, all of your services are sent through port 22; no one can distinguish the nature of your requests based on the port number. However the main advantage of using SSH is that it encrypts all traffic between your computer and our servers. This means that even if someone captures the information in transit, he can only see it as unintelligible random data. The final advantage of SSH is the fact that since it is our servers, not your computer, that are carrying out your desired actions, your anonymity is fully protected.

Do I need software for this?

Yes. In order to utilize this service you will need to download a SSH program. In the United States, Data Fellows sells F-Secure Version 1 and Van Dyke technologies sells SecureCRT which are compatible with our service. If you live outside the United States or you are looking for a free version, we recommend Tera Term Pro. For setup instructions for F-Secure, SecureCRT and Tera Term, please see our Support Pages.

This sounds complicated. Is this difficult to use? Do I need to be a computer genius in order to take advantage of this?

The technology behind the software is very complex and difficult to understand. However, to use the software is very simple. Once you have the software set up according to our Support Pages, all you need to do is connect and the software does the rest. The basics steps are: connect to your ISP, start the SSH software, enter your password at the prompt, and then begin surfing. It is that simple.

What are the advantages of Anonymizer Secure Tunneling?

Anonymizer Secure Tunneling offers several important advantages. Secure Tunneling customers are able to encrypt their web surfing, news & email traffic to our servers which protects them against monitoring by an ISP or government agency. Secure Tunneling customers also receive the Anonymizer Premium Surfing service to protect themselves as they visit web sites.

The setup pages say to make the connections to cyberpass.net. Who is cyberpass.net??

We are. Cyberpass.net is another domain name that we own and use for our services.

Does SSH encrypt my mail the same way PGP does?

No. PGP encrypts the text of your message and requires that both the receiving and sending parties have PGP software. SSH encrypts everything about the message, including the From and To fields and sends it to our servers. Since SSH does port forwarding, someone monitoring your connection will not be able to tell that what you sent was mail. When the message is received by our servers, the message is decrypted and sent "as normal" to the recipient. If you need the message to be encrypted from our servers to the recipient, then we encourage you to use PGP in conjunction with our SSH service.

Do you support SSH1 or SSH2?

SSH1

Can I use the SSH on my Linux or UNIX machine?

Yes. We cannot give specifics on how since it is dependent on your OS and the version of SSH you have installed. Consult your man pages for the specific flags to use when making your connection.