SSH Reverse Tunnels

Introduction

Reverse SSH port forwarding specifies that the given port on the remote server host is to be forwarded to the given host and port on the local side.

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Local Tunnel vs Remote Tunnel

Local Tunnel

-L is a local tunnel (YOU <-- CLIENT).

If a site was blocked, you can forward the traffic to a server you own and view it.

For example, if a remote machine port say 10000 is blocked via a firewall rule from the outside but accessible internally. However, Using an SSH Tunnel we can expose the port to us (locally)!

ssh -L 10000:localhost:1000 <username>@<ip>

And then we can access http://localhost:1000 to view the content.

Remote Tunnel

-R is a remote tunnel (YOU --> CLIENT). You forward your traffic to the other server for others to view.

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