As I tweeted earlier I was poking around my jail broken iPhone and discovered IP forwarding does work.  I’ve been searching for ways to tether my iPhone to various computers.  I was able to use OpenSSH and establish a SOCKS proxy yesterday.  That works nicely and given the “Location” feature of OS X and the Profile support of Firefox, that does provide a decent solution.

Problem is that Mail.app does not like to speak IMAPS  over a port forwarding SSH tunnel.  Actually it may been SMTPS over an SSH tunnel that it may dislike completely. Which I never did figure out or understand why. From a packet perspective they go into the tunnel and come out.

I’m looking to setup my iPhone into an IP router for my computers.  Now that I know the phone is capable of IP forwarding it is just a matter of getting the rest of the stuff setup. Ideally I want to setup an SSH VPN between my portable computer and my server.  Then all of my traffic will be encrypted until it exits @ my server at which point I don’t care.

I’m going to continue exploring the possibilities of the iPhone as a router and also as a stealth attack device.  Inside Cydia the normal good network goodies of nmap, netcat, tcpdump and are now installed on my phone.

Yes I’ve changed the default root password from ‘alpine’ to something else.  I go a step further on any public facing SSH enabled devices, I only allow key based authentication.

If you have any tips or suggestions let me know.