Browse securely with OpenVPN

Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you are forced to connect to the outside world through a decidedly insecure connection. Perhaps you are in an airport, using free Wifi, or a hotel room. Or, maybe you happen to be on the Rogers network, and you've read about the tendency of that ISP to watch what you are doing on line. Whatever the case may be, you are in a situation where security is somewhat less than ideal. If you have access to a machine on a secure connection somewhere else in the world, and that machine has either a static IP address or is configured through a free service such as dyndns.org, you can set things up so that all your Internet traffic is encrypted, and passes through the known, secure machine before coming to your local machine.

This is not difficult to set up.

First, you have to have OpenVPN server set up on the remote machine. We have covered this before, so if you don't have it in place, then go install and configure it. The instructions here are virtually identical to those we set up before, with one important difference -- we are going to tell OpenVPN to redirect all traffic through itself, so nothing going to your local machine (which I'll call a laptop) or leaving it will pass unencrypted. You are browsing so that all traffic is SSL encrypted.

You will recall that OpenVPN server is conrtolled using a file in /usr/local/etc/openvpn (at least on FreeBSD). Copy that file to one called "openvpnredir.conf" and edit it. We are going to change two things: the port that OpenVPN listens to, and we are going to add a directive that tells OpenVPN to redirect all traffic through its secure connection. Here is the file, with the changes higlighted in red.

# Specify device
dev tun

port 1195

# Server and client IP and Pool
server 10.9.0.0 255.255.255.0
ifconfig-pool-persist ipp2.txt

# Certificates for VPN Authentication
ca /usr/local/etc/openvpn/ca.crt
cert /usr/local/etc/openvpn/server.crt
key /usr/local/etc/openvpn/server.key
dh /usr/local/etc/openvpn/dh1024.pem


# Routes to push to the client
# in the next line 192.168.xxx.0 should be the ip range of your internal network
push "route 192.168.xxx.0 255.255.255.0 default" 

# route all traffic through vpn
push "redirect-gateway def1"

# Use compression on the VPN link
comp-lzo

# change the ip address in the next line to whatever dns you want to use
push "dhcp-option DNS 192.168.0.100"

# Make the link more resistant to connection
failures keepalive 10 60
ping-timer-rem
persist-tun
persist-key

# Run OpenVPN as a daemon and drop privileges to user/group nobody user nobody
group nobody
daemon

As you can see, the changes are minimal. Now, on the client side, find the configuration file you use to set up a VPN connection. On Macs, it's in ~/Library/openvpn. On Windows, it's usually in C:/Program Files/OpenVPN/config.

Duplicate that file, and change the name to something meaningful (i.e. Redir OpenVPN, or whatever), and then change the line that reads "port 1194" to "port 1195".

Now, you should have a new vpn connection available to you, and all traffic will go through the VPN server.