[ISN] SSH Bouncing - How to get through firewalls easily. (

From: InfoSec News (isn@private)
Date: Mon Aug 30 2004 - 22:15:26 PDT


Forwarded from: "Linux Security: Tips, Tricks, and Hackery" <brian@private>

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|  Linux Security: Tips, Tricks, and Hackery        30-August-2004 |
|  Published by Onsight, Inc.                             Edition  |
|                                                                  |
|  http://www.hackinglinuxexposed.com/articles/20040830.html       |
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SSH Bouncing - How to get through firewalls easily.
By Brian Hatch

Summary: Often you'll have firewalls or other network equipment that
doesn't allow direct SSH access to machines behind it. Using a bit of
trickery, you can get through without seemingly jumping through any
hoops.
                               ------

Have you ever been in the situation that you wanted to SSH directly
to a machine, but there has been some device in between that prevents
it? Say you have a Linux firewall that protects your DMZ, and you
have a boatload of machines behind it that you want to manage. There
are all sorts of methods that are used to do so, and all have some
level of annoyance.

SSH to the intermediate host
    The first and most simple solution is to SSH to the machine in
    the way, say the firewall. The firewall administrator can just
    set up one or more non-privileged accounts for users who need
    access to the machines behind it. This is a pain, of course - if
    you want to upload a file, you need to upload it to the firewall
    via sftp/scp, and then upload it to the target server. What a
    pain. And security-wise, you now have all these random firewall
    accounts running amok, probably not your favourite situation.

    Of course, it's still nicer than Windows networking, but we can
    do better.

Non-standard SSH ports
    You can set up a bunch of ports that tunnel into the target
    machines. You might have firewall port 5000 go to port 22 (the
    SSH port) on machine1, firewall:5001 go to machine2,
    firewall:5002 go to machine3, etc. For example,


      #!/bin/sh
      # Set up forwards for inbound SSH


      EXT_IP=205.382.29.20    # External IP address
      EXT_IFACE=eth0          # External Interface
      INT_IFACE=eth1          # Internal Interface

      # handy dandy tcp forward function
      tcp_forward () {
        local ext_port int_ip
        echo "$1" | {
          read int_ip  ext_port
           # create prerouting and appropriate forward from the tuple
           iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -d $EXT_IP \
              --dport $ext_port -j DNAT \
              --to-destination $int_ip:22
           iptables -A FORWARD -i $EXT_IFACE -o $INT_IFACE \
              -p tcp -d $int_ip --dport 22 -m state \
              --state NEW -j ACCEPT

       }

       tcp_forward " 192.168.1.1      5000"
       tcp_forward " 192.168.1.2      5001"
       tcp_forward " 192.168.1.3      5002"
       tcp_forward " 192.168.1.4      5003"
       ...
       tcp_forward " 192.168.1.58     5057"
       tcp_forward " 192.168.1.59     5058"


    What problems do we have with this setup? Well, you need to
    manage the forwards, which is rather a pain. Also, you now have
    these ports open to the outside world, which means you need to
    create ACLs for them on the firewall or the target or both, lest
    anyone be able to try to guess passwords.

    The other problem with this is that you'll get ssh host key
    conflicts unless you're careful -- you appear to connect to the
    machine 'firewall' but you get different keys when you hit the
    actual machine behind it. To get around this, you can use $HOME
    /.ssh/config sections like this:

      Host machine1
      Hostname firewall.my_network.com
      Port 5000
      HostKeyAlias machine1

      Host machine2
      Hostname firewall.my_network.com
      Port 5001
      HostKeyAlias machine2

    Then you can just ssh machine1 and not need to remember the port,
    and due to the HostKeyAlias option each machine will have it's
    own key recognised correctly, rather than sharing the one for the
    firewall.

Netcat SSH bounce
    This is my preferred method, and it can be used to create a
    seamless connection. What you do is SSH to the intermediate
    machine (the firewall in this example) and from that machine you
    run Netcat (nc). Netcat can be used in all sorts of situations,
    such as a replacement for telnet:

     $ nc www.some_host.com 80
     GET / HTTP/1.0

     ...

    When used as a telnet-like replacement, all it does is open up a
    connection to the remote port and transfer the data, unaltered,
    to and from it and your keyboard/screen. So how do we use this to
    help out with our SSH connection?

    OpenSSH supports the ability to use a proxy command. A proxy
    command is a program (shell script, binary, etc) that /usr/bin/
    ssh will run, rather than making an actual TCP connection to the
    target. The job of the proxy command is to establish a connection
    to the target. /usr/bin/ssh talks to this command, and doesn't
    care how it does its work.

    So, what will our proxy command do?

      + The proxy command will SSH to the firewall
      + On the firewall, it will run Netcat as follows:

          nc -w 1 target_host 22

    The nc command says 'connect to port 22 on the target host, and
    wait one second after the connection is dead before closing it.'
    Now Netcat's stdin/stdout are going to be connected to the SSH
    server on the target, and the /usr/bin/ssh client on your
    desktop. To the client program, it looks just like it's hit the
    target directly, the proxy does the work of getting them
    together.

    So, how do we create this proxy? How 'bout a shell script:

      $ cat netcat-proxy-command
      #!/bin/sh
      bouncehost=$1
      target=$2

      ssh bouncehost   nc -w 1 $target 22


    Then point to this proxy command via your $HOME/.ssh/config file:

      $ head $HOME/.ssh/config
      Host machine1
      Hostname machine1
      HostKeyAlias machine1
      ProxyCommand netcat-proxy-command firewall.my_network.com 192.168.1.1

      Host machine2
      Hostname machine2
      HostKeyAlias machine2
      ProxyCommand netcat-proxy-command firewall.my_network.com 192.168.1.2

      ...

    Or, to make it even easier to copy/paste, use the fact that %h in
    a $HOME/.ssh/config file is replaced with the hostname, and you
    can use the following:

      $ head $HOME/.ssh/config
      Host machine1
      Hostname 192.168.1.1
      HostKeyAlias machine1
      ProxyCommand netcat-proxy-command firewall.my_network.com %h

      Host machine2
      Hostname 192.168.1.2
      HostKeyAlias machine2
      ProxyCommand netcat-proxy-command firewall.my_network.com %h
      ...

    All the logic of how to actually get to the host is in the config
    file, all the magic in getting there is in the proxy script, and
    you can connect 'directly' to the target machine at the command
    line like this:

      $ ssh machine1
      $ scp machine1:/path/to/some/file .

    Now doing this requires that you can connect to the firewall
    without a password[1] If you can't, then you'll want to to enable
    SSH key based security. If you don't know how to do that yet, see
    one of the "Previous Articles" (http://
    www.hackinglinuxexposed.com/articles/20021211.html) that covers
    it.

There are many other options that I didn't cover here, such as VPN
technologies, Portknocking and fun tunnels like chownat (http://
chownat.lucidx.com/). While these can all be exciting, I'm trying to
stick to pretty portable tools that are likely pre-installed on your
machines anyway.

Next time, we'll see how to tighten security a bit by making changes
to the firewall user's configuration.

NOTES:

[1] If you don't have passwordless authentication to the firewall,
you'll need to type the firewall password each time too. This is
annoying, but not a show stopper.

                            -------------
Brian Hatch is Chief Hacker at Onsight, Inc and author of Hacking
Linux Exposed and Building Linux VPNs. He can't understand how a few
months have gone by since he had time to write. Oh wait, maybe it's
the number of kids in his home, and the massive distance between him
and any free babysitting -- i.e. relatives... Brian can be reached at
brian@private

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Copyright 2004, Brian Hatch.



_________________________________________
Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/



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