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Jaadu VNC, is what I've done secure?

A

afd

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 12, 2005
1,134
389
Scotland
Hi folks

I've set up my iMac so that I can control it ovver 3G and WiFi with my iPhone and Jaadu VNC. Much of networking is a mystery to me and I would like some feedback on how safe and secure the method I used is.

Here's what I did, my mac is a G5 iMac running Leopard-

Made sure all passwords were strong by generating them with 1Password.

Made up a dummy account for my mac.

Turned on screen sharing and set a password for VNC.

Turned on Remote Login and allowed my dummy account to login.

Set up a DynDNS account and entered the details into my router.

setup Port forwarding for SSH to my iMac.

Ran jaadu VNC and entered all the details above into it.

Like I said before, I'm not too hot on networking so any advice would be appreciated.

Also is there a VNC client for mac or windows that can connect securely with my mac at home? I'veread some articles on the internet about this, but there always seems to be someone criticizing each method about possible security flaws so the whole thing gets confusing:confused:.

Thanks

afd
 
belvdr

belvdr

macrumors 603
Aug 15, 2005
5,945
1,372
VNC is only secure if you are tunneling it over SSH. VNC authentication by itself is sent in the clear, which is no good.

In your SSH client, setup a tunnel. What you do is specify a local port that is forward across the tunnel.

For example, let's say you use 172.16.6.0 as your home network. You would configure the tunnel so that local port 1900 (example) is forwarded to 172.16.6.5:5900 (where 172.16.6.5 is the IP of your iMac and 5900 is the VNC port).

Then SSH to your box, and launch your VNC client. Tell the VNC client to connect to localhost:1900 (your local machine and port 1900 configured above), and it will tunnel across the SSH connection to your iMac.

Keep in mind VNC is already slow, and SSH does it no favors in terms of performance, but it does secure the connection.
 
A

afd

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 12, 2005
1,134
389
Scotland
Thanks for your reply. I'm not too sure if I understand all that you say though.
I think Jaadu has SSH built in, maybe when I turn on encryption on it, that's the tunnel you mention?
I tried to connect with encryption turned off on the client and it couldn't connect, so does that suggest I am secure?
 
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