SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

X Forwarding

Now that you’ve seen general TCP port forwarding, we move to a new topic: forwarding of X protocol connections. X is a popular window system for Unix workstations, and one of its best features is its transparency. Using X, you can run remote X applications that open their windows on your local display (and vice versa, running local applications on remote displays). Unfortunately, the inter-machine communication is insecure and wide open to snoopers. But there’s good news: SSH X forwarding makes the communication secure by tunneling the X protocol.

X forwarding also addresses some firewall-related difficulties. Suppose you’re a system administrator with a set of exposed production machines on the other side of a firewall from you. You log into one of these machines using SSH, and want to run a graphical performance-monitoring tool, such as Solaris’s perfmon, that uses the X Window System. You can’t, though, because to do that, the external machine needs to make a TCP connection back to the internal machine you started on, and the firewall blocks it (as it should, since X is quite insecure). X forwarding solves this problem, permitting X protocol connections to pass through the firewall, securely tunneled via SSH.

Our discussion begins with a brief overview, then explains the details of X forwarding. In addition to explaining how to use X forwarding, we also expose the internals of X authentication and how it interacts with SSH, as well as other technical topics.

9.4.1 The ...