Establish a TCP socket tunnel over web socket connection, for circumventing strict firewalls.
npm install -g wstunnel
Run the websocket tunnel server at port 8080 on all interfaces:
wstunnel -s 0.0.0.0:8080
Run the websocket tunnel client:
wstunnel -t 33:2.2.2.2:33 ws://host:8080
In the above example, client picks the final tunnel destination, similar to ssh tunnel. Alternatively for security reason, you can lock tunnel destination on the server end, example:
Server:
wstunnel -s 0.0.0.0:8080 -t 2.2.2.2:33
Client:
wstunnel -t 33 ws://server:8080
In both examples, connection to localhost:33 on client will be tunneled to 2.2.2.2:33 on server via websocket connection in between.
To tell client to connect via http proxy, do:
wstunnel -t 33:2.2.2.2:33 -p http://[user:pass@]proxyhost:proxyport wss://server:443
For dev/test purpose, client can set '-c' option to disable ssl certificate check.
This also makes you vulnerable to MITM attack, so use with caution.
To get help, just run
wstunnel
A public docker image "mhzed/wstunnel" is now available.
Example:
# run as client to connect to wss://server.com, tunnel localhost:2244 to target.ip:22
docker run --rm -d -p 2244:2244 mhzed/wstunnel -t 0.0.0.0:2244:target.ip:22 wss://server.com
Notice "-t 0.0.0.0:2244..." above. By default wstunnel binds to localhost which is unreachable inside a docker container, so make sure to specify "0.0.0.0" to bind to all local IPs.
For tunneling over strict firewalls: WebSocket is a part of the HTML5 standard, any reasonable firewall will unlikely be so strict as to break HTML5.
Currently wstunnel in server mode supports plain tcp socket only. For SSL support (highly recommended), setup a NGINX reverse proxy.
On server, wstunnel listens on localhost:8080:
wstunnel -s 8080
On server, run NGINX (>=1.3.13) with sample configuration:
server {
listen 443;
server_name mydomain.com;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /path/to/my.crt
ssl_certificate_key /path/to/my.key
ssl_session_timeout 5m;
ssl_protocols SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1;
ssl_ciphers ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}
}
Then on client:
wstunnel -t 99:targethost:targetport wss://mydomain.com
To use as a proxy for "ssh", run:
ssh -o ProxyCommand="wstunnel -t stdio:%h:%p https://server" user@sshDestination
Above command will ssh to "user@sshDestination" via wstunnel server at "https://server".
Let's say you want to use a Remote Desktop connection to a machine with IP 2.2.2.2
Run the wstunnel server on a different machine, tunneling to the destination on the RDP port 3389:
wstunnel -s 0.0.0.0:8080 -t 2.2.2.2:3389
On the destination, you need to tweak some registry settings to relax the security policy for Remote Desktop.
Open RegEdit, and navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp
Change "SecurityLayer" to 0
Change "SelectNetworkDetect" to 0
Reboot
On the client, first start wstunnel:
wstunnel -t 3389 ws://server:8080
Now you can just open Remote Desktop Connection and connect to localhost
When using socks proxy, ensure the host is IP address only, DNS name is not supported. For example:
# "localhost" won't work
wstunnel -t 2255:sshhost:22 --proxy socks://localhost:3111 http://wsserver
# instead, do:
wstunnel -t 2255:sshhost:22 --proxy socks://127.0.0.1:3111 https://wsserver
An http tunnel will be established if websocket connection fails. Two long live http connections are established for sending and receiving data.