I'm currently working on setting up a proxy on my home computer to bypass my school's blockers, and want to see if I can make any improvements to security. To be clear, I haven't opened this to the internet yet, I'm asking BEFORE doing that.
The setup is thus: I have a squid server running on my linux laptop, which will only allow authenticated users through. It's no longer listening to the default port (3128) and is instead listening to a port in the 10000-20000 range. I would have both my router and modem set to forward that same port, and my laptop's local IP address is static.
This is a consumer internet connection, so Dynamic DNS, but I have a NOIP address ready to connect once I open the ports (already have the client installed and running, just throws an error on the website because it can't get through the port.)
I'll be connecting to my proxy server through the FoxyProxy extension, rather than through the Windows 11 control panel on my school laptop, because I dont have access to that specific part of the control panel.
That's the sum total of the setup I've got thus far. It only needs to be able to support my lone connection, I'm not sharing this around. Any improvements to be made?
Doesn't quite answer the question, but what I did back then in school is I had set up NoMachine over SSH on my laptop and just had the Windows client on my MP3 player. I'd just plug it in, run the client and remote into my laptop, and as a bonus I wasn't really using the school's computers, I was using mine remotely. Nothing to see on the school's computer, no history. For IT, I guess I just looked like a kid that's doing a lot of stuff over SSH. Today that'd be x2go, although RDP or VNC would also probably work fine.
I don't know if the remote aspect helped, but the teachers didn't care and definitely knew. A friend on mine did something similar, got caught and ultimately got away with it because the remote desktop software itself wasn't violating the policy, and he wasn't technically bypassing restrictions either, and he wasn't caught actively visiting a site that should have been blocked. YMMV.