Sheepsafe

Description

Sheepsafe is a small utility to keep you safe from FireSheep! It's a tool for mobile geeks.

We all know the cookie-stealing issue has been out there for a while, but now with FireSheep, it just got way too easy. If you're like me, I don't want to get exposed at the next gathering of techies at a conference or even at a local coffee shop with this thing out there. So I built Sheepsafe for myself.

Sheepsafe was built to automate the task of switching your network configuration to use a SOCKS proxy whenever you join an untrusted network.

Sheepsafe works by keeping a configuration of known safe wireless networks. When you join an untrusted network, Sheepsafe switches to a network location that has a SOCKS proxy configured and starts a SOCKS proxy by SSH'ing into a remote server, thus protecting your browsing traffic from FireSheep and other snoopers on the local network. When you switch back to a safe network, Sheepsafe switches back to the default, trusted location and shuts down the SOCKS proxy.

You could probably use something like Marco Polo for this too, but this setup Works For Me.

Requirements

Mac OS X. That's what I run. You'll have to cook something else up for a different OS. Tested on 10.6.
An SSH account on a remote server that can serve as a SOCKS proxy through which to tunnel traffic. Typically this can be an EC2 server, a VPS, or some other cloud instance.
Ruby 1.8.7 or greater. The Mac OS X system-installed Ruby is preferred as the OS will be launching Sheepsafe in the background.

Install

First install the gem: sudo gem install sheepsafe It's recommended to install using the system Ruby to minimize difficulties informing launchd about an RVM or some other package manager.
After installing the gem, run sheepsafe install and follow the prompts for configuring Sheepsafe.

Growl

If you wish to receive Growl notifications when Sheepsafe is switching your location, be sure to install the growlnotify utility from the "Extras" folder in the Growl .dmg. Then install the growl gem:

  sudo gem install growl

Post-install

Be sure you configure your applications to use system-wide proxy settings for making connections, where applicable.

Uninstall

Run sheepsafe uninstall to unregister the Launchd task and remove Sheepsafe vestiges from your system.

Give back

I'll gladly accept pull requests and bug reports.

digitalhobbit/sheepsafe