19.6 Establishing a Secure Remote Desktop Session

The remote desktop connection from macOS and Windows in the previous section is considered to be insecure because no encryption is used. This is acceptable when the remote connection does not extend outside of an internal network protected by a firewall. When a remote session is required over an internet connection, however, a more secure option is needed. This is achieved by tunneling the remote desktop through a secure shell (SSH) connection. This section will cover how to do this on Linux, UNIX and macOS client systems.

When a remote desktop session is invoked on an Ubuntu system a connection is made using TCP/IP network port 5900. To prove this, establish a connection to your remote Ubuntu system referencing port 5900 after the hostname or IP address, for example, and note that the connection is still established:

192.168.86.218:5900

To implement an encrypted remote desktop session for non-Linux system the session needs...