sshuttle
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sshuttle is a transparent proxy tool that routes traffic over SSH, combining aspects of a VPNVPNA virtual private network, an encrypted tunnel between devices or networks. It carries traffic across another network as though the endpoints had a private connection. without requiring admin access on the remote network.
SSHUTTLE_ARGS="-v -x 192.168.1.0/24" sshuttle 10.0.0.0/8 sshuttle --dns --method auto --subnet '*.internal' 192.168.1.1 sshuttle --dns --method auto --sudoers-no-modify 10.0.0.0/8 sshuttle --tproxy -m 100 user@host1 & sshuttle --tproxy -m 200 user@host2 sshuttle --udp-port-mark 1234 <target> sshuttle --latency-buffer-size 65535 <target>
Summary
sshuttle is an open-source command-line tool that gives you transparent proxy access to a remote network over plain SSH, without setting up a real VPN. You run it from a terminal on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS or Windows, using an existing SSH login rather than admin rights on the far end, and it forwards traffic for whole subnets instead of requiring a port-forward per host. This suits sysadmins and engineers who need ad hoc access into a remote network and find OpenSSH's own port forwarding too slow or fiddly, and who want to avoid IPsecIPsecA suite of IETF protocols that authenticate and encrypt IP packets at the network layer, giving cyber tools a standards-based way to build VPNs or secure host-to-host tunnels without modifying applications., PPTP or other VPN setups the README calls needlessly complex. It can also run as a background service under a config management system. Development remains active, with 164 contributors and a release as recently as 376 days ago.
sshuttle is a transparent proxy tool that routes traffic over SSH, combining aspects of a VPN without requiring admin access on the remote network.
How sshuttle helps
How do I reach every host on a remote subnet without setting up a VPN or opening a port forward per host?
routes whole subnets of traffic through an existing SSH login, so any host or port on the far side becomes reachable the moment the session is up
Can I get into a remote network when I only have an ordinary SSH login, not admin rights there?
works entirely from a normal SSH account on the far end, needing no elevated access on the remote machine to set up the forwarding
Why does traffic through my SSH port forward feel slow or flaky compared to a real VPN?
avoids TCP-over-TCP tunneling by redirecting connections at the network layer, sidestepping the performance problem that plain port forwarding runs into
How do I keep a standing tunnel into a remote network running unattended?
can run as a background service under a config management system rather than as a one-off foreground session
How do I isolate this tunnel's traffic from the rest of the host's network stack?
on Linux it switches into its own network namespace to redirect traffic, instead of rewriting the host's shared firewall rules
Languages
Command line
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Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for sshuttle, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail sshuttle puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
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Releases
6 entries
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- February 20251
- April 20241
- September 20221
- January 20223
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in sshuttle/sshuttle, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 9 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 2 +1 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close < 1 day first maintainer reply 4.7 hours
- Open backlog 210 of 534 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 210
- Contributors / month 3
- Commits / month 3
- Stars 13,566
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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