Databases, Systems & Networks

To demonstrate how iptables can perform network address translation this how-to shows how to use it to implement a over-simplified load balancer. In practice we would use a daemon such as HAProxy allowing IP tables to check packets before forwarding them.

Using the method presented in this tutorial packets get forwarded without going through the INPUT, FORWARD and OUTPUT chains.

iptables is a powerful tool that is used to create rules for how incoming or outgoing packets are handled. It keeps track of a packets state – there is NEW, ESTABLISHED, RELATED, INVALID and UNTRACKED. It can make filtering decisions based on the packets header data and the payload section of the packet, for these purposes iptables even has regular expression matching.

On top of that iptables has extensions that can be used to filter packets based on a packets history so we can keep track of packets and sessions. We can set filters to only trigger at specific times, parse the packet contents and header information searching for specific patterns, differentiate protocols such as tcp, udp, icmp, etc.

For load balancing behavior we want the incoming packets on one machine to be routed to another machine. iptables has extentions that helps us achieve this aim but we also need to muck around with its internal PREROUTING and POSTROUTING table, which is not recommended as this could potentially pose a security risk. lets use iptables to route all traffic coming in on an interface eth0 with a destination port 80 and route it to another IP address:

Allow IP forwarding

(Note: if your testing this on the same box your doing this on it won’t work, you need at least 3 machines to test this out, virtual ones work nicely)

First we enable ipv4 forwarding or this will not work:
# echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

XOR

# sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

next we add a filter that changes the packets destination ip and allows us to masquerade:

# iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.0.0.3:80
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

The above filter gets added to iptables PREROUTING chain. The packets first go through the filters in the PREROUTING chain before iptables decides where they go. The above filter says all packets input into eth0 that use tcp protocol and have a destination port 80 will have their destination address changed to 1.2.3.4 port 80. The DNAT target in this case is responsible for changing the packets Destination IP address. Variations of this might include mapping to a different port on the same machine or perhaps to another interface all together, that is how one could implement a simple stateful vlan (in theory).

The masquerade option acts as a one to many NAT server allowing one machine to route traffic with one centralized point of access. This is similar to how many commercial firewalls and network routers function.

The above ruleset results in all incoming packets to dport 80 traversing the iptables chains in a straight line from INCOMING to OUTGOING in the image below, effectively bypassing any rules we might have had in our INPUT chain. If we were to choose to implement nat like this we would need to implement those – our desired INPUT filter rules – on the machines where traffic is forwarded OR add them to the FORWARD chain if we want to block things before they are forwarded (Note: packets might go through FORWARD chain in both directions so direction needs to be considered when writing filters for this chain).

Path incoming packets take through iptables chains

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Vulnerability “Port Fail” reveals real IP address

We have discovered a vulnerability in a number of providers that allows an attacker to expose the real IP address of a victim. “Port Fail” affects VPN providers that offer port forwarding and have no protection against this specific attack. Perfect Privacy users are protected from this attack.

This IP leak affects all users: The victim does not need to use port forwarding, only the attacker has to set it up.

We have tested this with nine prominent VPN providers that offer port forwarding. Five of those were vulnerable to the attack and have been notified in advance so they could fix this issue before publication. However, other VPN providers may be vulnerable to this attack as we could not possibly test all existing VPN providers.

Details about the leak

The attacker needs to meet the following requirements:

• Has an active account at the same VPN provider as the victim
• Knows victim’s VPN exit IP address (can be obtained by various means, e.g. IRC or torrent client or by making the victim visit a website under the attackers control)
• The attacker sets up port forwarding. It makes no difference whether the victim has port forwarding activated or not.

The IP leak can then be triggered as follows:

1. Victim is connected to VPN server 1.2.3.4
2. Victim’s routing table will look something like this:
   0.0.0.0/0 -> 10.0.0.1 (internal vpn gateway ip)
   1.2.3.4/32 -> 192.168.0.1 (old default gateway)
3. Attacker connects to same server 1.2.3.4 (knows victim’s exit through IRC or other means)
4. Attacker activates Port Forwarding on server 1.2.3.4, example port 12345
5. Attacker gets the victim to visit 1.2.3.4:12345 (for example via embedding <img src=”http://1.2.3.4:12345/x.jpg”> on a website)
6. This connection will reveal the victim’s real IP to the attacker because of the “1.2.3.4/32 -> 192.168.0.1” vpn route.

The crucial issue here is that a VPN user connecting to his own VPN server will use his default route with his real IP address, as this is required for the VPN connection to work. If another user (the attacker) has port forwarding activated for his account on the same server, he can find out the real IP addresses of any user on the same VPN server by tricking him into visiting a link that redirects the traffic to a port under his control.

Also note that due to the nature of this attack all VPN protocols (IPSec, OpenVPN, PPTP, etc.) and all operating systems are affected.

Mitigation

Affected VPN providers should implement one of the following:

• Have multiple IP addresses, allow incoming connections to ip1, exit connections through ip2-ipx, have portforwardings on ip2-ipx
• On Client connect set server side firewall rule to block access from Client real ip to portforwardings that are not his own.

Source: Perfect Privacy

There are many types of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks that can affect and bring down a website, and they vary in complexity and size. The most well known attacks are the good old SYN-flood, followed by the Layer 3/4 UDP and DNS amplification attacks.

Today though, we’re going to spend a little time looking at Layer 7, or what we call an HTTP Flood Attack.

An HTTP flood attack is a type of Layer 7 application attack that utilizes the standard valid GET/POST requests used to fetch information, as in typical URL data retrievals (images, information, etc.) during SSL sessions. An HTTP GET/POST flood is a volumetric attack that does not use malformed packets, spoofing or reflection techniques. – DDoSAttacks.biz

If you’re wondering, yes, we deal with these every day, and we protect our client websites via our Website Firewall.

Today I’m going to share with you some details on a rather large DDoS attack that leveraged the following HTTP request flood attack to wreak havoc on a clients website. I’ll also share the steps we took to mitigate the issue.

Layer 7 DDoS – HTTP Flood Attacks

The first thing to understand about Layer 7 attacks is that they require more understanding about the website and how it operates. The attacker has to do some homework and create a specially crafted attack to achieve their goal. Because of this, these types of DDoS attacks require less bandwidth to take the site down and are harder to detect and block.

Layer 7 DDoS – Part 1: Random URLs

This specific client came to us after his site was down for almost a week. They tried other services to protect their website with not much luck. As soon as he switched his DNS to us, we gained a much deeper appreciation and started to see why.

He was getting thousands of requests like these every second:

75.118.29.205 - - [20/Jan/2014:19:32:06 -0500] "GET /?458739416183768700 HTTP/1.1" 200 440 "http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70136122&trkid=7882978&t=Weeds" ""
173.245.56.201 - - [20/Jan/2014:19:32:06 -0500] "GET /?458726993617499500 HTTP/1.1" 200 440 "http://landing.pcwhatsap.com/1/?offer_id=3534&aff=1788&url_id=5618&sub_id=whatsapp_pop" ""
79.19.41.22 - - [20/Jan/2014:19:32:06 -0500] "GET /?458741338856272200 HTTP/1.1" 200 440 "http://www.rumoreweb.it/index.php?option=com_news_portal&view=category&id=21&Itemid=259" ""
190.121.64.3 - - [20/Jan/2014:19:32:06 -0500] "GET /?458722169268652700 HTTP/1.1" 200 440 "http://www.eldivisadero.cl/noticias/?task=show&id=37352" ""
186.54.141.146 - - [20/Jan/2014:19:32:06 -0500] "GET /?458741274224646000 HTTP/1.1" 200 440 "http://badoo.com/01244944965/?r=37.4&p=1" ""

To be more exact, he was getting 5,233 HTTP requests every single second. From different IP addresses around the world.

What is important to note here is how this worked against the client’s platform. The client’s website was built on WordPress. The uniqueness of the requests were bypassing the caching system, forcing the system to render and respond to every request. This was bringing about system failures as the server quickly became overwhelmed by the requests.

For illustration purposes, here is a quick geographic distribution of the IP’s hitting the site. This is for 1 second in the attack. Yes, every second these IP’s were changing.

Stopping the DDoS: Once we identified the type of attack, blocking was easy enough. By default, they were not passing our anomaly check, causing the requests to get blocked at the firewall. One of the many anomalies we look for are valid user agents, and if you look carefully you see that the requests didn’t have one. Hopefully, you’ll also noticed that the referrers were dynamic and the packets were the same size, another very interesting signature. Needless to say, this triggered one of our rules, and within minutes his site was back and the attack blocked.

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Source: Trafic monitor small solution for Linux

The software is really small and fast to install. Was designed to work mostly with iptables and on Linux platform.

Installation is easy. Just add those lines to your firewall or put somewhere to start allways.
After this modification the collect.sh script with the result from your iptables -L -n. And of course put the .php files somewhere to access via www and make the directory writeable. The output file must be in the directory where are the php files. By default without selecting anything will show last hour traffic. It’s pretty live(update at 6 seconds, not like other programs).

Quick example:

[root@lair trafip]# iptables -A OUTPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0 -d 127.0.0.1
[root@lair trafip]# iptables -A INPUT -d 0.0.0.0/0 -s 127.0.0.1
[root@lair trafip]# iptables -L -n|grep 127|grep -v ACCEPT|grep -v LOG|grep -v DROP
all -- 127.0.0.1 0.0.0.0/0
all -- 0.0.0.0/0 127.0.0.1

Get the strings « 127.0.0.1 0.0.0.0/0 » and « 0.0.0.0/0 127.0.0.1 » and put in collect.sh. Must be exact like iptables shows (better you copy paste that part). The script collect.sh must be always running to count.

In img.php modify:

$target variable with the name where you redirect the output from collect.sh (ex: $target="local";)
$ip variable with the IP (ex: $ip="127.0.0.1";)
$maxspeed variable with the maximum traffic can be done in 6 seconds (ex: $ip="115200";). If you have black lines on your graph without stopping the interface/traffic then increase the value.
$upload variable with red or green (ex: $upload="red";)
$download variable with red or green (ex: $download="green";)
$imagetype variable with png, gif or jpg, if for output format of graph (ex: $imagetype="gif")

The output file must be something like:

11/12/02 05:57:26 10782702 149477806
11/12/02 05:57:32 10783170 149489806
11/12/02 05:57:38 10783810 149509426

(format: month/day/year[space]hour:minutte:second[space]INPUT_counter[space]OUTPUT_counter

Source: By Gerard Beekmans

Linux has a number of useful bandwidth monitoring and management programs. A quick search on Freshmeat.net for bandwidth returns a number of applications. However, if all you need is a basic overview of your total bandwidth usage, iptables is all you really need — and it’s already installed if you’re using a Linux distribution based on the 2.4.x or 2.6.x kernels.

Most of the time we use iptables to set up a firewall on a machine, but iptables also provides packet and byte counters. Every time an iptables rule is matched by incoming or outgoing data streams, the software tracks the number of packets and the amount of data that passes through the rules.

It is easy to make use of this feature and create a number of « pass-through rules » in the firewall. These rules do not block or reroute any data, but rather keep track of the amount of data passing through the machine. By using this feature, we can build a simple, effective bandwidth monitoring system that does not require additional software.

Depending on how the firewall rules are set up, the setup for bandwidth monitoring may be very simple or very complex. For a desktop computer, you may need to create only two rules to log the total input and output. A system acting as a router could be set up with additional rules to show the totals for one or more subnets, right down to the individual IP address within each subnet. In addition to knowing exactly how much bandwidth each host and subnet on the network is using, this system could be used for billing or chargeback purposes as well.

Rules setup

The rules setup itself is quick and straightforward, and takes only a few minutes. Obviously, you need to be root or use sudo to insert iptables rules.

The examples in this article are based on a router that provides Internet service to various towns. The iptables rules keep track of how much bandwidth each town uses and how much bandwidth each customer in that town uses. At the end of each month, an administrator checks the counters. Individuals who use more than they were supposed to get billed for over usage, the counters are reset to zero, and the process is repeated at the beginning of the next month.

The IP addresses in this article are modified from the real addresses. We’ll use the private IP space 192.168.0.0/16, subnetted into smaller blocks.

First, we will create two custom chains for the two towns and put town-specific rules in them. This will keep the built-in FORWARD chain relatively clean and easy to read. In this example, the FORWARD chain will only provide the global counters (all customers combined on a per-town basis).

iptables -N town-a
 iptables -N town-b

The next data element is the total bandwidth counter. Because this machine is a router only, the INPUT and OUTPUT chains are of little interest. This machine will not be generating a significant amount of bandwidth (i.e., it is not serving as a mail or Web server), nor will it be receiving significant uploads from other hosts.

Total bandwidth downloaded by and uploaded to the two towns combined:

iptables -A FORWARD

This is the easiest of rules. The rule will match any source and any destination. Everything that is being passed through this router matches this rule and will provide the total of combined downloaded and uploaded data.

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