Over the past six months I’ve been messing around with setting up a secure connection to my home network. If you’ve ever used a public wireless connection, unless you are connecting to a vpn at work or elsewhere , your computer is wide open to anyone else on the same hot-spot. Anything you send such as passwords or user-names can be sniffed by a malicious character. However if you have a home broadband connection, you can setup a secure server that you can access from anywhere via an SSH tunnel. SSH stands for secure shell, and is a communication protocol. An SSH tunnel will provide you with a very strongly encrypted communication stream, that no one monitoring you is going to be able to crack. It took me a while to put together all the correct pieces to do what I want, but I have it working really well now. I have put together a draft of a setup guide that compiles information from a variety of different sources I have found. There are quite a few steps, but it is actually not very difficult if your just follow the guide and do each step. I will be refining this guide over the coming weeks. If you decide to try this give me some feedback on the guide. If you find any errors or have problems let me know. You can find the guide here. Except for the router, all the software elements I reference are free and open source and won’t cost you a dime.