You're in an airport, and there's free wifi (you're obviously not in the US...). You want to connect but are worried about someone sniffing your connection. You're rich, so you have a remote box with ssh access to it.

The solution is to ssh into your remote box and forward all your traffic to it. It will be your secure proxy for your session.

Easy to do:

Open a terminal and issue:

ssh -D 8888 remote-host

This will start port dynamic port forwarding to the remote-host machine.

Then, set up a proxy on your local machine to proxy all localhost traffic to port 8888.

On the Mac, it looks like this:

Image

Presto, as long as the terminal is open with the ssh -D command running, all your internet communications will pass through to the remote-host using the secure socket connection.