Edit/Solved: Thank you for all the great input! Both on alternative solutions and on security implications. I'm going to make a draft on how I would setup the e-mail method as securely as possible as a programming/scripting exercise, but will IRL probably end up using either some reverse tunnel/shell variant.

Edit 2: or, as a hardware solution, install an extra NIC that I expose to the opennet - thus enabling remote port forwarding - while binding all my sensitive processes/traffic to my encrypted NIC.

I cannot ssh into my Linux box from outside of my LAN since I'm behind a VPN that doesn't support port forwarding. Is it possible to make my Linux box receive, interpret and execute commands through e-mail instead? I've tried looking for answers through DuckDuckGo's search engine, to no avail. If I may dream, I would like to setup an e-mail server with a systemd service or just run a script that continuously downloads the emails, prints their content to stdin and executes, perhaps through command substitution, whatever is in stdin.

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[–] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Sounds like A/B X/Y problem.

If you just want to ssh into it - there is a thing that you can find by searching "reverse remote shell over HTTPS/WebSocket".

Solutions like these pop up, but I have not personally used any of them:

  • Upterm
  • WebTTY
  • sshx
  • Teleconsole
  • tmate

Check out whether they could do what you want them to do.

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