Socks5 / SSH / VPN tunneling considerations

General Tor and Anonymity Talk
1

Objective: use Firefox, on Whonix Workstation, to connect to a website through a VPS (with root access).

Options:

  1. Use Firefox’s configurations for a socks5 proxy. Setup an SSH tunnel to the VPS using

ssh -D port username@server

  1. Same socks5 configuration on Firefox, but set up a socks server on the VPS using shadowsocks-libev

  2. Use openvpn on the client, set up openvpn server on the VPS.

I assume SSH and VPN are better than the socks5 server due to the encryption, and VPN is preferable to SSH due to better handling of UDP (mentioned in Connecting to Tor before SSH).

However, if the main purpose is to make the connection look as “normal” (“common”, perhaps be a better word) as possible from the point of view of the site we connect to, which of those settings may be preferable?

2

At this time - most realistically - using VPN - since it is the only option where we have setup of a fail closed mechanism fully documented.