cipherdyne.org

02 January, 2012

After a long development cycle, fwknop-2.0 has been released. This is the first production release of the fully re-written C version of fwknop, and is the culmination of an effort to provide Single Packet Authorization to multiple open source firewalls, embedded systems, mobile devices, and more. On the "server" side, supported firewalls now include iptables on Linux, ipfw on FreeBSD and Mac OS X, and pf on OpenBSD. The fwknop client is known to run on all of these platforms, and also functions on Windows systems running under Cygwin. There is also an Android client, and a good start on a iPhone client as well. On a personal note, I wish to thank Damien Stuart for a heroic effort to port most of the original perl code over to C. Also, several other people have made significant contributions including Jonathan Bennet, Max Kastanas, Sebastien Jeanquier, Ozmart, and others. If there are any issues, please get in touch with me directly or send an email to the fwknop mailing list.

Update 01/03: Both libfko library that powers much of fwknop operations and the fwknop client can be compiled as native Windows executables. In addition, there are perl and python bindings to libfko as well.

Update 01/07: Damien Stuart has built RPM files for fwknop on RHEL5, RHEL6, Fedora 15, 16, and 17 and for other architectures the Fedora koji build system can produce.

11 December, 2011

The 2.0rc5 candidate release of fwknop is available for download. There may be a few tweaks to the code before the official 2.0 release is made, but this is pretty close as-is. Significant development work has gone into fwknop since the 2.0rc4 release, and adds some major new functionality as well as fixing a few bugs. Here is a summary of the changes:

iPhone fwknop client: Max Kastanas has contributed an iPhone port of the fwknop client. He had already contributed on Android client, so the iPhone was the next natural step! We're looking for a maintainer of the iPhone code so that eventually it can be made available through the App Store. If you have iPhone development experience and are interested in taking this on, please contact me.

PF firewall support on OpenBSD: For quite a while now fwknop has brought Single Packet Authorization support to iptables firewalls on Linux and ipfw firewalls on FreeBSD and Mac OS X systems. The 2.0rc5 release now introduces support for the PF firewall on OpenBSD systems. By interfacing with the pfctl command, fwknop creates new rules to access a protected service (such as SSHD) to a PF anchor. Rules are deleted out of a running anchor with pfctl -a <anchor> -f - with the expired rule(s) removed. There is support in the fwknop test suite (see the test/ directory in the fwknop-2.0rc5 sources) to validate fwknop operations on OpenBSD systems, and if there are any issues please let me know.

Expiring SPA keys: With large SPA deployments where many different encryption keys - either Rijndael or GPG keys - are used to service lots of external users, key management can become somewhat of a burden. This feature allows an expiration date to be set in the access.conf file on a per-key basis. Any SPA packet received for an expired key is ignored by fwknopd. This feature was suggested by ozmart from the fwknop mailing list.

FORCE_NAT mode: For iptables firewalls, a new FORCE_NAT mode has been implemented that works as follows: for any valid SPA packet, force the requested connection to be NAT'd through to the specified (usually internal) IP and port value. This is useful if there are multiple internal systems running a service such as SSHD, and you want to give transparent access to only one internal system for each stanza in the access.conf file. This way, multiple external users can each directly access only one internal system per SPA key.

lsof launcher: The fwknop lsof launcher (extras/fwknop-launcher/fwknop-launcher-lsof.pl) is a lightweight daemon that allows the user to not have to manually run the fwknop client when attempting to gain access to a service that is protected by via fwknopd. This is accomplished by checking the output of lsof to look for pending connections in the SYN_SENT state, which (usually) indicate that a remote firewall is blocking the attempted connection. At this point, the launcher executes the fwknop client with the --get-key arg (so the user must place the key in the local filesystem) to generate an SPA packet for the attempted connection. The remote fwknopd daemon will reconfigure the firewall to allow temporary access, and this usually happens fast enough that the original connection attempt will then succeed as TCP retries to establish the connection. The idea for this was originally for a pcap-based connection watcher by Sebastien Jeanquier.

Several other changes and small fixes have been made as well. The fwknop test suite supports running all tests through the excellent valgrind project, and this enabled several memory handling issues to be found and corrected.

fwknop is released under the GPL version 2, and the complete fwknop-2.0rc5 ChangeLog can be found here via the fwknop gitweb interface.

10 October, 2011

Vasilis Mavroudis has developed a web proxy called WebKnock.org that allows anyone to generate an fwknop SPA packet on their behalf with just a web browser. Although fwknop client portability has improved quite a bit in anticipation of the upcoming fwknop-2.0 release, it is a nice addition to the SPA world to not need the fwknop client installed at all. There are probably several platforms where the native client might not function but can run a web browser.

Using the webknock.org proxy requires that the user provide the SPA key over SSL to webknock.org, but this is a necessary step in exchange for not having to install the fwknop client. As of this writing, SPA via gpg keys is not yet supported, but there are plans to support this in the future. All requests to generate an SPA packet are protected by a captcha.

Behind the scenes, webknock.org executes the fwknop client on behalf of users, and Vasilis informed me that he's using the latest client code (written in C) instead of the older perl client. This is good since all recent development is done on the C version of fwknop in order to make it as small and lightweight as possible.

The service is free, and will hopefully be open-sourced at some point as well. If there are any issues, please either email me or open a ticket on the fwknop github interface. Here is a screenshot of the current webknock.org site:

23 August, 2011

The C version fwknop has now made it into the OpenWrt Linux distribution for embedded devices. Jonathan Bennett made this possible by contributing a Makefile for OpenWrt, and it was picked up the OpenWrt maintainers. It is good to see progress made towards the integration of Single Packet Authorization into operating systems that are designed to function as secure gateway devices between multiple networks.

So far, fwknop is available in the OpenWrt trunk packages feed, but will eventually become available via the opkg package manager too. Fortunately, OpenWrt makes everything available via git: $ git clone git://nbd.name/packages.git openwrt_packages.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/mbr/src/openwrt_packages.git/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 56118, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (21342/21342), done.
remote: Total 56118 (delta 29694), reused 54875 (delta 29054)
Receiving objects: 100% (56118/56118), 11.85 MiB | 2.57 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (29694/29694), done.
$ cd openwrt_packages.git
$ git ls-files |grep fwknop
net/fwknop/Makefile
$ git log net/fwknop/Makefile
commit 89475e5d6136833fa3b59c3d47c4f2be02718c7a
Author: florian <florian@3c298f89-4303-0410-b956-a3cf2f4a3e73>
Date: Wed Aug 17 10:13:20 2011 +0000

[package] add fwknopd

Signed-off-by; Jonathan Bennett <[email removed]>

git-svn-id: svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/packages@28030 3c298f89-4303-0410-b956-a3cf2f4a3e73

In other news, both the perl and C versions of fwknop are also available in the Pentoo Linux distribution thanks to ozmart and the Pentoo maintainers. Pentoo is a live-cd distribution that is focused on security and derived from Gentoo. ozmart wrote a description of the use case for fwknop on Pentoo from a pentration testing perspective:

"...This is a useful script when combined with iptables and sshd. Configuration can accommodate pgp and replay attack checks. It allows the box to appear silent when running daemons if your box is deployed in say, a hostile environment.

It can also allow commands to be run without actually having to log into the box, say if you wanted to trigger something interesting from a remote location..."

23 June, 2011

fwknop has made it into BackTrack Linux distribution. Well, it didn't make it into the default image, but it is in the BackTrack software repository so installing it is a snap with apt-get or aptitude. Below is a screenshot of the BackTrack 5 VM installed under VMware Player running on Ubuntu, and running a search shows both the fwknop-client and fwknop-server packages that are maintained by Franck Joncourt for the Debian distribution.
Update 06/24/2011: Thanks to Sebastien Jeanquier for calling this to my attention and helping to support the inclusion of fwknop in BackTrack Linux.

07 January, 2011

Kicking off 2011 with a bang is easy this year - Max Kastanas has ported the fwknop client to the Android mobile operating sytem. This brings Single Packet Authorization to Google's smart phones, and was accomplished using Damien Stuart's libfko implementation. All of the Android code can be found in the Cipherdyne Trac respository. A couple of screenshots of using the SPA app from an Android phone appear below - after the SPA packet is sent and verified passively by the fwknop daemon on the remote system, the fwknop Android app automatically launches Connectbot to access SSHD:

20 August, 2010

Every few months it seems that there is a new variation of a password guessing botnet. This time around, as reported by the SANS ISC and also by malwarecity.com, a botnet called "dd_ssh" has been built up around a vulnerability in phpMyAdmin. (Here is the vulnerability announcement from the Debian security list.) Once a vulnerable webserver has been compromised, the botnet starts scanning random IP addresses for SSH servers and attempts to brute force passwords for those systems that accept an SSH connection. Although software like Fail2ban and DenyHosts can offer detection and mitigation by applying thresholds to the number of failed login attempts in the SSH log and communicate offending source IP's to a set of interested users, a fundamental problem is that the targeted SSH daemons are reachable in the first place from arbitrary source IP's. A more powerful solution is to hide your SSH daemon behind a default-drop firewall policy and only grant access through Single Packet Authorization. Any botnet that is scanning for SSH servers will not be able to guess any passwords or even exploit a zero-day vulnerability in an SSH daemon that is protected in this way.

Further, SSH brute forcing botnets have shown some innovative techniques where password guessing attempts are spread out over a long period of time and failed passwords are distributed across the botnet. The end result is that each botnet node knows the population of passwords that other nodes have already tried on each targeted SSH daemon, and so new passwords can be tried while still slipping beneath common detection thresholds. The same password never has to be tried twice botnet-wide. It is not clear yet whether the dd_ssh botnet uses a similar password distribution strategy, but either way I intend to stop such guessing games at the earliest stage possible and block all SSH connections by default.

25 Jul, 2010

For the past several months, the pure-C implementation of Single Packet Authorization with fwknop has been in development, and the first release candidate of fwknop-2.0.0 is ready for download. Damien Stuart is the primary developer of this code, and I wish to thank him for all of his efforts in making this release possible. The original perl version of fwknop will continue to receive bug fixes as they are found, but the primary development effort is now on the lightweight and portable C code. The Trac interface for the perl code has moved to fwknop-perl. Any release that is at fwknop-2.0.0 or above will be the C implementation, and any release in the 1.9 series or before are in perl (and will remain available here). The perl and C versions are compatible with each other, so SPA packets created by the fwknop perl client can be properly decrypted and decoded by the new fwknopd C server, and similarly SPA packets built with the fwknop C client can be interpreted by the fwknopd perl server.

The heart of the new C code is the libfko library, which is used by both the fwknop client and the fwknopd server for SPA packet encryption/decryption and interpretation. The libfko library is portable to several platforms including Linux and Windows, and the standard GNU autoconf project is used for building fwknop from sources.

Given the compact nature of the C code, the fwknop-2.0.0rc1 release candidate is already known to function on OpenWRT, and Damien Stuart (the primary developer of the fwknop C code) has built packages for the OpenWRT Kamikaze and Backfire releases. This brings SPA functionality to embedded systems, and has been tested on a Linksys WRT54GS V2.0 router. The OpenWRT packages are available here.

There will be a few release candidates of fwknop-2.0.0 to ensure proper operation on a variety of platforms, and the emphasis will be on stability and ironing out any bugs. Also, fwknop-2.0.0 will initially support iptables firewalls on the servers side, with ipfw support coming soon after. There is one nice feature in fwknop-2.0.0rc1 that deserves a mention - the fwknop client now supports the notion of a ~/.fwknoprc file that allows a set of stanzas to be defined for remote SPA servers and customize the command line arguments used to access each one. Here is an example stanza: # Example for a destination server of 192.168.1.20 to open access to
# SSH for an IP that is resolved externally
#
[myssh]
SPA_SERVER 192.168.1.20
ACCESS tcp/22
ALLOW_IP resolve
SPA_SERVER_PORT 50023
Now, with the fwknop client, we reference this stanza with the -n command line argument like so: $ fwknop -n myssh -vvv
Resolved external IP (via http://www.cipherdyne.org/cgi-bin/myip) as: 123.1.2.3
Enter encryption password:

FKO Field Values:
=================

Random Value: 8308719569638051
Username: mbr
Timestamp: 1280030806
FKO Version: 1.9.12
Message Type: 1
Message String: 123.1.2.3,tcp/22
Nat Access: <NULL>
Server Auth: <NULL>
Client Timeout: 0
Digest Type: 3

Encoded Data: 8308719569638051:bWJy:1280030806:1.9.12:1:OTYuMjQ0LjE3MS4yNTMsdGNwLzIy

SPA Data Digest: WcUEVesZDIY+CKRKYTck8zMW7HG0S7RcqmXVIMC4L58

Final Packed/Encrypted/Encoded Data:

87wQ3s171if9x8628P6k1oBrQEJEmS5c/+ECed5cfDmu8hGhC5esUCEVcI8IH5TdjWva44efebX+cfXUVPBU9c/6tJpOLwC8k/8sN87SgYkBK+m64aD4FnnndaeqsrIcO/oHcpXHk9S/8rqqypcumNtlXVZD/isS3Q729LMTa+2uI6TsGX9OQ3

Generating SPA packet:
protocol: udp
port: 50023
send_spa_packet: bytes sent: 182 On the fwknopd server side, we see the following printed to the terminal in --foreground mode as the SPA packet is received and an iptables ACCEPT rule is added for SSH access and then removed after 30 seconds. Using Digest Cache: '/usr/var/run/fwknop/digest.cache' (entry count = 93)
PCAP filter is: udp port 50023
Starting fwknopd main event loop.


SPA Packet from IP: 123.1.2.3 received.
SPA Packet: '87wQ3s171if9x8628P6k1oBrQEJEmS5c/+ECed5cfDmu8hGhC5esUCEVcI8IH5TdjWva44efebX+cfXUVPBU9c/6tJpOLwC8k/8sN87SgYkBK+m64aD4FnnndaeqsrIcO/oHcpXHk9S/8rqqypcumNtlXVZD/isS3Q729LMTa+2uI6TsGX9OQ3'

SPA Decode (res=0):
SPA Field Values:
=================
Random Value: 8308719569638051
Username: mbr
Timestamp: 1280030806
FKO Version: 1.9.12
Message Type: 1
Message String: 123.1.2.3,tcp/22
Nat Access: <NULL>
Server Auth: <NULL>
Client Timeout: 0
Digest Type: 3
Encoded Data: 8308719569638051:bWJy:1280030806:1.9.12:1:OTYuMjQ0LjE3MS4yNTMsdGNwLzIy
SPA Data Digest: WcUEVesZDIY+CKRKYTck8zMW7HG0S7RcqmXVIMC4L58

Added Rule to FWKNOP_INPUT for 123.1.2.3, tcp/22 expires at 1280030886
RES=0, CMD_BUF: /sbin/iptables -t filter -L FWKNOP_INPUT --line-numbers -n 2>&1
RULES LIST: Chain FWKNOP_INPUT (1 references)
num target prot opt source destination
1 ACCEPT tcp -- 123.1.2.3 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:22 /* _exp_1280030886 */

Removed rule 1 from FWKNOP_INPUT with expire time of 1280030886.


05 January, 2010

Russ McRee of holisticinfosec.org has written the January Toolsmith issue from the ISSA Journal about fwknop and the ability to create ghost services with Single Packet Authorization. In his Toolsmith paper, Russ emphasizes the possibility of using the ghost services concept to bypass strict outbound network filtering rules on a local network in order to access an external service that is bound to a port that is filtered by the local firewall. That is, the service is made accessible by having the SPA packet created by the fwknop client request that the remote fwknopd server create iptables DNAT rules to forward connections to a port that the local network actually allows out to the port where the service is bound. Russ uses this concept to access a file that is piped through a netcat listener on TCP port 6543, but do it from the heavily filtered network over TCP port 110 (normally associated with pop3).

Here is a link to the Toolsmith PDF entitled "Single Packet Authorization: The Ghost in the Machine".

22 June, 2009

On June 19th Leandro Almeida gave a presentation entitled "Single Packet Authorization - Increasing the security in SSH" at the ENSOL conference in João Person, Brazil. ENSOL is an open source conference that goes by the title "Freedom in the Extreme", and given that Brazil is highly supportive of Linux, I'm sure that it is a good conference. Leandro has posted an English translation of his slides here. It is good to see some additional presentations on the SPA concept at open source conferences, and Leandro emphasizes the usage of the fwknop SPA implementation to protect SSH.