Tunneling VNC over SSH has several benefits. For one, if you are using a non-Mac version of VNC, your traffic is probably going over the network unencrypted. By default, the Mac VNC client encrypts keystrokes, including the login.

Another benefit of using VNC over SSH is that your client Mac may be behind a firewall, which you cannot reach directly. If there is some other host, like maybe the firewall itself, which you can SSH to, then you can use SSH port forwarding to “bounce” your VNC session off of that host and connect from there to your client Mac.

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