Making SSH work by proxy

It is a popular misbelief that hiding encrypted connections (SSH) behind a proxy is a dark domain reserved to crime activities. You may need a Russian or Iranian proxy to get your coding job done, when firewalls of your favourite coffee place or wifi in travel forbid the use of SSH.

As this happens to me regularly – I travel a lot – I would like to share a solution here. The most effective is to proxy the traffic through port 443 (default for HTTPS, typically enabled). Testing the list of free proxy servers ^​1​ we find that the proxy 185.82.139.1 (Iranian) is working well. It remains to add a proxy instruction to the ssh configuration as shown below. That’s it, and I can work with GitHub in my favourite coffee place in France. Enjoy!

# content of .ssh/config
Host github.com
    HostName github.com
    User git
    Port 22
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
    StrictHostKeyChecking no
    ProxyCommand ncat --proxy 185.82.139.1:443 github.com 22