- Sniffing is capturing packets as they pass on the wire to review for interesting information
- MAC (Media Access Control) - physical or burned-in address - assigned to NIC for communications at the Data Link layer
- 48 bits long
- Displayed as 12 hex characters separated by colons
- First half of address is the organizationally unique identifier - identifies manufacturer
- Second half ensures no two cards on a subnet will have the same address
- NICs normally only process signals meant for it
- Promiscuous mode - NIC must be in this setting to look at all frames passing on the wire
- CSMA/CD - Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection - used over Ethernet to decide who can talk
- Collision Domains
- Traffic from your NIC (regardless of mode) can only be seen within the same collision domain
- Hubs by default have one collision domain
- Switches have a collision domain for each port
- SMTP is sent in plain text and is viewable over the wire. SMTP v3 limits the information you can get, but you can still see it.
- FTP sends user ID and password in clear text
- TFTP passes everything in clear text
- IMAP, POP3, NNTP and HTTP all send over clear text data
- TCP shows sequence numbers (usable in session hijacking)
- TCP and UCP show open ports
- IP shows source and destination addresses
- Stands for Address Resolution Protocol
- Resolves IP address to a MAC address
- Packets are ARP_REQUEST and ARP_REPLY
- Each computer maintains it's own ARP cache, which can be poisoned
- Commands
- arp -a - displays current ARP cache
- arp -d * - clears ARP cache
- Works on a broadcast basis - both requests and replies are broadcast to everyone
- Gratuitous ARP - special packet to update ARP cache even without a request
- This is used to poison cache on other machines
- Uses 128-bit address
- Has eight groups of four hexadecimal digits
- Sections with all 0s can be shorted to nothing (just has start and end colons)
- Double colon can only be used once
- Loopback address is ::1
IPv6 Address Type | Description |
---|---|
Unicast | Addressed and intended for one host interface |
Multicast | Addressed for multiple host interfaces |
Anycast | Large number of hosts can receive; nearest host opens |
IPv6 Scopes | Description |
---|---|
Link local | Applies only to hosts on the same subnet (Address block fe80::/10) |
Site local | Applies to hosts within the same organization (Address block FEC0::/10) |
Global | Includes everything |
- Scope applies for multicast and anycast
- Traditional network scanning is computationally less feasible
- Lawful interception - legally intercepting communications between two parties
- Active - interjecting something into the communication
- Passive - only monitors and records the data
- PRISM - system used by NSA to wiretap external data coming into US
- Passive sniffing - watching network traffic without interaction; only works for same collision domain
- Active sniffing - uses methods to make a switch send traffic to you even though it isn't destined for your machine
- Span port - switch configuration that makes the switch send a copy of all frames from other ports to a specific port
- Not all switches have the ability to do this
- Modern switches sometimes don't allow span ports to send data - you can only listen
- Network tap - special port on a switch that allows the connected device to see all traffic
- Port mirroring - another word for span port
- Switches either flood or forward data
- If a switch doesn't know what MAC address is on a port, it will flood the data until it finds out
- CAM Table - the table on a switch that stores which MAC address is on which port
- If table is empty or full, everything is sent to all ports
- This works by sending so many MAC addresses to the CAM table that it can't keep up
- Tools
- Etherflood
- Macof
- Switch port stealing - tries to update information regarding a specific port in a race condition
- MAC Flooding will often destroy the switch before you get anything useful, doesn't last long and it will get you noticed. Also, most modern switches protect against this.
- Also called ARP spoofing or gratuitous ARP
- This can trigger alerts because of the constant need to keep updating the ARP cache of machines
- Changes the cache of machines so that packets are sent to you instead of the intended target
- Countermeasures
- Dynamic ARP Inspection using DHCP snooping
- XArp can also watch for this
- Default gateway MAC can also be added permanently into each machine's cache
- Tools
- Cain and Abel
- WinArpAttacker
- Ufasoft
- dsniff
- Attempt to exhaust all available addresses from the server
- Attacker sends so many requests that the address space allocated is exhausted
- DHCPv4 packets - DHCPDISCOVER, DHCPOFFER, DHCPREQUEST, DHCPACK
- DHCPv6 packets - Solicit, Advertise, Request (Confirm/Renew), Reply
- DHCP Steps
- Client sends DHCPDISCOVER
- Server responds with DHCPOFFER
- Client sends request for IP with DHCPREQUEST
- Server sends address and config via DHCPACK
- Tools
- Yersinia
- DHCPstarv
- Mitigation is to configure DHCP snooping
- Rogue DHCP Server - setup to offer addresses instead of real server. Can be combined with starvation to real server.
- MAC Spoofing - changes your MAC address. Benefit is CAM table uses most recent address.
- Port security can slow this down, but doesn't always stop it
- MAC Spoofing makes the switch send all packets to your address instead of the intended one until the CAM table is updated with the real address again
- IRDP Spoofing - hacker sends ICMP Router Discovery Protocol messages advertising a malicious gateway
- DNS Poisoning - changes where machines get their DNS info from, allowing attacker to redirect to malicious websites
- Wireshark
- Previously known as Ethereal
- Can be used to follow streams of data
- Can also filter the packets so you can find a specific type or specific source address
- Example filters
- ! (arp or icmp or dns) - filters out the "noise" from ARP, DNS and ICMP requests
- http.request - displays HTTP GET requests
- tcp contains string - displays TCP segments that contain the word "string"
- ip.addr==172.17.15.12 && tcp.port==23 - displays telnet packets containing that IP
- tcp.flags==0x16 - filters TCP requests with ACK flag set
- tcpdump
- Recent version is WinDump (for Windows)
- Syntax
- tcpdump flag(s) interface
- tcpdump -i eth1 - puts the interface in listening mode
- tcptrace
- Analyzes files produced by packet capture programs such as Wireshark, tcpdump and Etherpeek
- Other Tools
- Ettercap - also can be used for MITM attacks, ARP poisoning. Has active and passive sniffing.
- Capsa Network Analyzer
- Snort - usually discussed as an Intrusion Detection application
- Sniff-O-Matic
- EtherPeek
- WinDump
- WinSniffer
- Intrusion Detection System (IDS) - hardware or software devices that examine streams of packets for malicious behavior
- Signature based - compares packets against a list of known traffic patterns
- Anomaly based - makes decisions on alerts based on learned behavior and "normal" patterns
- False negative - case where traffic was malicious, but the IDS did not pick it up
- HIDS (Host-based intrusion detection system) - IDS that is host-based
- NIDS (Network-based intrusion detection system) - IDS that scans network traffic
- Snort - a widely deployed IDS that is open source
- Includes a sniffer, traffic logger and a protocol analyzer
- Runs in three different modes
- Sniffer - watches packets in real time
- Packet logger - saves packets to disk for review at a later time
- NIDS - analyzes network traffic against various rule sets
- Configuration is in /etc/snort on Linux and c:\snort\etc in Windows
- Rule syntax
- alert tcp !HOME_NET any -> $HOME_NET 31337 (msg : "BACKDOOR ATTEMPT-Backorifice")
- This alerts about traffic coming not from an external network to the internal one on port 31337
- alert tcp !HOME_NET any -> $HOME_NET 31337 (msg : "BACKDOOR ATTEMPT-Backorifice")
- Example output
- 10/19-14:48:38.543734 0:48:542:2A:67 -> 0:10:B5:3C:34:C4 type:0x800 len:0x5EA xxx -> xxx TCP TTL:64 TOS:0x0 ID:18112 IpLen:20 DgmLen:1500 DF
- Important info is bolded
- Firewall
- An appliance within a network that protects internal resources from unauthorized access
- Only uses rules that implicitly denies traffic unless it is allowed
- Oftentimes uses network address translation (NAT) which can apply a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship between external and internal IP addresses
- Screened subnet - hosts all public-facing servers and services
- Bastion hosts - hosts on the screened subnet designed to protect internal resources
- Private zone - hosts internal hosts that only respond to requests from within that zone
- Multi-homed - firewall that has two or more interfaces
- Packet-filtering - firewalls that only looked at headers
- Stateful inspection - firewalls that track the entire status of a connection
- Circuit-level gateway - firewall that works on Layer 5 (Session layer)
- Application-level gateway - firewall that works like a proxy, allowing specific services in and out
- Slow down - faster scanning such as using nmap's -T5 switch will get you caught. Pros use -T1 switch to get better results
- Flood the network - trigger alerts that aren't your intended attack so that you confuse firewalls/IDS and network admins
- Fragmentation - splits up packets so that the IDS can't detect the real intent
- Unicode encoding - works with web requests - using Unicode characters instead of ascii can sometimes get past
- Tools
- Nessus - also a vulnerability scanner
- ADMmutate - creates scripts not recognizable by signature files
- NIDSbench - older tool for fragmenting bits
- Inundator - flooding tool
- ICMP Type 3 Code 13 will show that traffic is being blocked by firewall
- ICMP Type 3 Code 3 tells you the client itself has the port closed
- Firewall type can be discerned by banner grabbing
- Firewalking - going through every port on a firewall to determine what is open
- Tools
- CovertTCP
- ICMP Shell
- 007 Shell
- The best way around a firewall will always be a compromised internal machine
- A system setup as a decoy to entice attackers
- Should not include too many open services or look too easy to attack
- High interaction - simulates all services and applications and is designed to be completely compromised
- Low interaction - simulates a number of services and cannot be completely compromised
- Examples
- Specter
- Honeyd
- KFSensor