Creeva’s World 2.0

I will first start off a cou­ple dis­claimers. I don’t do this at work, I don’t need to. I respect my cor­po­rate poli­cies and com­pletely rec­og­nize why they are there. This being a men­tal exer­cise that stemmed out of a mis­con­cep­tion on how our local fire­wall works. I love the men­tal exer­cises on how I would do some­thing and then drop it since I’ve essen­tially com­pleted my goal and do not need to test it. If how­ever you do feel the need to test this at your school or work I take no respon­si­bilty for your actions. You are on your own and respon­si­ble for your own actions.

I’m also too lazy to give explicit step by step instruc­tions on setting

Step 1.

You have two choices you need to decide on depend­ing on your capa­bil­i­ties, either set­ting up your home com­puter to proxy for you while your at work or buy­ing a cheap hosted web­site online. It all depends on if your ISP allows you to get to your home machine or if they block it. (Yes with a hosted it will cost you money but the link I gave you gives you your first domain for free). I would use a hosted solu­tion per­son­ally.
Step 2.

At this point I hope you have decided on which solu­tion you are going to go with. Essen­tially the steps are going to be the same either way, con­fig­u­ra­tion is on your head though. You are going to setup your web server to allow you to con­nect to it via SSL. This allows your com­mu­ni­ca­tion to what your net­work admin­is­tra­tor to see as a ran­dom web host to be encrypted. This means they will not be able to look inside the pack­ets. The steps depend­ing on oper­at­ing sys­tem and web server capa­bil­i­ties is dif­fer­ent in each sce­nario, so please Google to find how to setup an HTTPS web server for your desired oper­at­ing system/hosting capa­bil­i­ties. You may need to setup a dynamic dns solu­tion to get back to your home PC if you choose that route.

Step 3.

At this point you should have nice web setup that you can login into via SSL. What to host on the site? You need a site that can go out and fetch pages for you act­ing as a proxy within the web browser. Their are mul­ti­ple solu­tions for this, and this is really is another step I’m not going to walk you through. This is the point where you are com­mit­ted and going to vio­late cor­po­rate or school pol­icy. If some­one wants to right direc­tions for it in the com­ments I won’t cen­sor them, I’m just not going to be the one that explic­itly tells you.

Step 4.

If you can fig­ure it out now what you have is a ran­dom SSL that you can use to browse any­thing your net­work admin­is­tra­tor doesn’t want you to. Sure you could have just used Google’s Cache, but then fil­ter­ing soft­ware still could get con­tex­tual infor­ma­tion about what your surf­ing based upon the words in the HTML code. This allows you encrypted anonymity.

What if the net­work admin­is­tra­tor blocks access to my SSL site?

Well this shouldn’t hap­pen unless you share the site with peo­ple. If you want your own pri­vate surf­ing enjoy­ment I would sug­gest keep­ing it to your­self. If how­ever you kept it to your­self and you still get blocked there are a cou­ple options to check.

Can you still get any­where or has your Inter­net Access been removed?

If your Inter­net access has been removed do not pass go, do not col­lect 200.00, within the scope of this arti­cle I can’t help you.

Is it blocked by DNS name?

If it’s blocked by DNS name mean­ing that it’s check­ing to see if your going to www.bobssecretsslsite.com then you will have to use a new domain name with your host­ing provider or a new dynamic DNS name. Yes this might cost you 6.95 (look for coupons through GoDaddy or another cheap host­ing reg­is­trar, but you really want the Inter­net your way unfil­tered right? If not why are you still read­ing this, com­mit­ment and free­dom are not free.

Is it blocked by IP Address?

Well if it is your almost screwed, you need to either get another host­ing provider or hope your home com­puter (if you using that approach) has a ran­dom DHCP that will reset when you power cycle your modem.

What if you looks at my Inter­net Cache?

This is really how they will catch you. There are a few choices you can do. The first is set your browser to clear your Inter­net Cache every time you log out. This will leave behind file traces if they use undelete util­i­ties on you, but these steps is for the overly para­noid. If you are wor­ried the your net­work admin­is­tra­tor is brows­ing your tem­po­rary Inter­net Files look­ing for porn.jpg or some such you have two solu­tions. The first is using a USB drive and fire­fox portable installed on that USB drive. This allows you to take your browser when­ever you leave your desk.

If your com­pany has a pol­icy banned USB device and you don’t want to break a sec­ond pol­icy on top of the one you have already bro­ken, down­load true­crypt. Fol­low truecrypt’s step on set­ting up an encrypted par­ti­tion. Install fire­fox portable into the encrypted par­ti­tion. Now your whole brows­ing his­tory is saved into an encrypted par­ti­tion that only you have the pass­word to decrypt.

For bonus points use a com­bi­na­tion of true­crypt and the USB key. Encrypted data you can take with you that allows you access to your own web site that can allow you access past any web fil­ter­ing software.

Warn­ing

Your images are still the­o­ret­i­cally stored in your com­put­ers mem­ory so , if you com­puter gen­er­ates a mem­ory dump you could still get caught.  Also some com­pa­nies track the flow of infor­ma­tion across their net­works, the­o­ret­i­cally this type of soft­ware can also see what you have in mem­ory.  These are the only real flaws I find in this scenario.

Bonus Round

For bonus points on annoy­ing your net­work admin­is­tra­tor who is overly happy about his web fil­ter­ing solu­tion. Cre­ate a new igoogle theme with a bit flesh you crop from a pic­ture you have of someone’s arm and name it porn.job. Have this has the back­ground in your igoogle theme. Dou­ble bonus points for mak­ing two more jpg’s, one for each cor­ner of your igoogle them. A pic­ture of Richard Nixon named d-ck.jpg and a pic­ture of your cat name p-ssy.jpg. You’ll set of his fil­ter­ing soft­ware every­time you go to google.

Have fun.

P.S.

If this sounds too geeky, too techini­cal, too com­plex, or pain in the butt.….…then you don’t deserve this solution.