Re: Bypassing firewall

From: Marcus J. Ranum (mjrat_private)
Date: Thu Feb 03 2000 - 07:36:43 PST

  • Next message: Darren Reed: "Re: Bypassing firewall"

    Darren writes:
    >Hmmm.  Not sure.  Let me explain.  If I somehow get an internal box with
    >an agent installed which makes connections outbound on port 80 and only
    >does so in response to a magic email message that I send, then it is
    >highly likely a proxy will dump it if it's not HTTP.  Then again, if the
    >end is effectly an in.rshd, compiled with SSL, and *connects* to my rsh
    >process that listens on port 443 (again in response to a magic email),
    >then no magic proxy can determine if it's HTTP or anything else.
    
    Why have anything incoming at all? Why not have it open an
    outgoing connection every so often to a randomized list of URLs,
    and, if it gets back a .jpeg (or something that looks like one)
    strip off the .jpeg header, write it as a .exe file, and run
    it? Instant downloadable code that will punch past any firewall
    I know of (except my "ultimate firewall...")  It could send
    data out as email, or in URLs over http. SSL would just cause
    suspicion.
    
    I remember a funny I heard about at a USENIX ages ago where
    someone had an application that (this was a desperate kludge!)
    used to manipulate /etc/utmp to encode data so it would go
    out on the LAN in rwho packets, thereby allowing them to do
    remote status checks on certain applications. It was the
    winner in one of the "worst abuses of UNIX" contests someone
    held (I came in 3rd with my hack of using wc on /dev/mem to
    get hardware RAM sizes for ULTRIX...)
    
    
    > > No, it's worse. The 'solution' is to disable any protocol
    > > that issues connections which are not immediately tied to
    > > an authentication that isn't performed by a computer.
    >
    >Is that sufficient ?  Users are pretty dumb, after all.
    
    Well, the ultimate solution would be to disable all the users...
    
    mjr.
    



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