Your own server as the exit

Your browser never needs to know anything about SSH. An ordinary ssh with dynamic forwarding runs beside the profile and opens a real SOCKS5 entrance on loopback.

For the engine that is an ordinary local address, so the profile launches like any other and nothing is downgraded behind your back.

The entry itself sits in the same library as every other address: you type it as one line and paste it in bulk with the rest.

A key file is the road that works on every system. You point at the file and ssh reads it: ARMANOS never opens your private key.

A server password works on macOS and Linux, and so does a key that carries a password of its own.

Every process under your account can read a command line, so your password never goes into one. The ssh client asks for it its own way, and your answer reaches it through a channel in a folder only you can open.

Your password never reaches the disk at all, and it is gone the moment the tunnel stands.

Your personal ssh configuration is switched off while the tunnel runs. A jump host or a name rewrite living in it could send a profile somewhere you never chose, and you would never know.

Known servers are remembered in a file of the program's own, because the file you sign in to work with is not ours to edit.

• Your configuration

  Your profile never reads it, so nothing written there can redirect it.

• Your known hosts

  Never written to: the tunnel keeps a list of servers of its own instead.

• Your other keys

  Never offered: name a key file and only that key is tried, name none and only the password.

A broken tunnel never stays looking alive. The local entrance belongs to it and dies with it, so every request from that window is turned away.

The app then raises it again on the port your browser already knows: a window that is already running would never learn a new one.

Endless retries would burn the connection limit at your own server and hide the trouble, so you are told aloud at the third failure.

1. 1

   Watched for you

   Every 15 seconds, so a dead connection is known in under a minute.

2. 2

   Three tries in a row

   Three times on the same port, with a growing pause between tries.

3. 3

   You are told

   One line says the tunnel came back, another says it did not.

The check button raises a real tunnel, measures through it and takes it down as soon as the check is done. A check that passes therefore means a launch will get that far too.

It also names the country your server comes out of, and from that country the profile takes its clock and its language list.

A tunnel that will not come up tells you its own reason, from a login the server refused to a key that changed, rather than blaming the address.