Corkscrew is a tool for tunneling SSH through HTTP proxies, but... you might find another use for it.

Corkscrew has been compiled on:

• HPUX
• Solaris
• FreeBSD
• OpenBSD
• Linux
• Win32 (with Cygwin)

Corkscrew has been tested with the following HTTP proxies:

• Gauntlet
• CacheFlow
• JunkBuster
• Apache mod_proxy

Please open a pull request if you get it working on other proxies or compile it elsewhere.

Corkscrew's primary distribution site was agroman.net/corkscrew, however it seems that the site went down and this repository is here to keep the code available. The new location is then github.com/bryanpkc/corkscrew.

First you need to install development tools:

# For Debian-based distributions (Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, ...)
sudo apt install build-essential

# For Red-Hat-based distributions (CentOS, Fedora, ...)
sudo yum groupinstall 'Development tools'

You need to clone the repo and then you need to go into the corkscrew source directory and run

autoreconf --install
./configure
make
sudo make install

This will compile corkscrew and copy it into /usr/local/bin/corkscrew.

If you want to go more in depth about the configuration, please have a look at the INSTALL file which gives general information about the build system.

Setting up Corkscrew with SSH/OpenSSH is very simple. Adding the following line to your ~/.ssh/config file will usually do the trick (replace proxy.example.com and 8080 with correct values):

ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/corkscrew proxy.example.com 8080 %h %p

NOTE: Command line syntax has changed since version 1.5. Please notice that the proxy port is NOT optional anymore and is required in the command line.

You will need to create a file that contains your usename and password in the form of:

username:password

I suggest you place this file in your ~/.ssh directory.

After creating this file you will need to ensure that the proper perms are set so nobody else can get your username and password by reading this file. So do this:

chmod 600 myauth

Now you will have to change the ProxyCommand line in your ~/.ssh/config file. Here's an example:

ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/corkscrew proxy.work.com 80 %h %p ~/.ssh/myauth

The proxy authentication feature is very new and has not been tested extensively so your mileage may vary. If you encounter any problems when trying to use this feature please email me. It would be helpful if you could include the following information:

• Proxy version (ie. Gauntlet Proxy, Microsoft Proxy Server, etc)
• Operating system you are trying to run corkscrew on
• Command line syntax you are using
• Any error messages that are visible to you

NOTE: I have had problems using the auth features with Mircosoft Proxy server. The problems are sporadic, and I believe that they are related to the round-robin setup that I was testing it again. Your mileage may vary.

The main author is Pat Padgett. But none of the contact info left work anymore, so a name is all we have.

Bryan Chan created this repository and tweaked the code a little bit. Then Rémy Sanchez improved the documentation.