Recently, I was describing the personal setup I use to connect to my home machine over on watchingback (a group that has gone unfortunately silent). This setup combines port-knocking (with one-time sequences), disk encryption, and passphrase-protected rsa keys. Here’s a basic rundown of how it works from an end-user perspective (i.e., once everything is set up):
First, the user (me) inserts a USB flash drive with an encrypted partition. He mounts up the encrypted disk on a local machine (I’ll call this machine the ‘client’ throughout this article), providing the necessary password, and runs a script called ‘callhome’. He is prompted for his passphrase, and then gets a terminal session on his home machine (we’ll call this one the ‘server’).
Read on for details about this setup, and how to do it.
