Defeating firewall with non-standard ports? [closed]

Question

I work at a huge corporate with a huge corporate firewall that blocks most outgoing services other than http and https. But my team needs access to a tame LAMP server to help them do their jobs.

I'm no expert, but would we be able to achieve this by setting up an EC2 instance with services listening on non-standard ports? I think we'd mainly need ssh, smb and rsync, so I'm thinking (for example) one IP for Apache on port 80, another for ssh on port 80 and smb on 443, and another for rsync on port 80. I think these would all be TCP but I'm not sure.

The team can then just connect to those addresses on those ports and "tunnel" out of the LAN.

Or am I smoking crack?

Answer 1

Unlikely. Big corporate firewalls are smart enough to notice that traffic passing over TCP/80 is patently not HTTP-like and block it. There are ways to tunnel ssh over HTTPS, but that's why BCF's tend to restrict SSL-enabled sites as well, especially if they're worried about the corporate Intellectual Property leaving via unauthorized routes such as SSL-encrypted Gmail.

Your most reliable way is to try and work with your IT department to figure out a workable solution. Everything else may end up in disciplinary procedures for circumventing network security procedures.

Answer 2

If it is a "tame" server and your team needs it to do their job, contact your IT department and have them allow access.