Databases, Systems & Networks

Question: Whenever Apache2 web server returns error pages (e.g., 404 not found, 403 access forbidden pages), it shows web server signature (e.g., Apache version number and operating system info) at the bottom of the pages. Also, when Apache2 web server serves any PHP pages, it reveals PHP version info. How can I turn off these web server signatures in Apache2 web server?

Revealing web server signature with server/PHP version info can be a security risk as you are essentially telling attackers known vulnerabilities of your system. Thus it is recommended you disable all web server signatures as part of server hardening process.

Disable Apache Web Server Signature

Disabling Apache web server signature can be achieved by editing Apache config file.

On Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint:

$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

On CentOS, Fedora, RHEL or Arch Linux:

$ sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Add the following two lines at the end of Apache config file.

Then restart web server to activate the change:

$ sudo service apache2 restart (Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint)
$ sudo service httpd restart (CentOS/RHEL 6)
$ sudo systemctl restart httpd.service (Fedora, CentOS/RHEL 7, Arch Linux)

The first line ‘ServerSignature Off‘ makes Apache2 web server hide Apache version info on any error pages.

However, without the second line ‘ServerTokens Prod‘, Apache server will still include a detailed server token in HTTP response headers, which reveals Apache version number.

What the second line ‘ServerTokens Prod‘ does is to suppress a server token in HTTP response headers to a bare minimal.

So with both lines in place, Apache will not reveal Apache version info in either web pages or HTTP response headers.

Hide PHP Version

Another potential security threat is PHP version info leak in HTTP response headers. By default, Apache web server includes PHP version info via « X-Powered-By » field in HTTP response headers. If you want to hide PHP version in HTTP headers, open php.ini file with a text editor, look for « expose_php = On », and change it to « expose_php = Off ».

On Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint:

$ sudo vi /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

On CentOS, Fedora, RHEL or Arch Linux:

$ sudo vi /etc/php.ini

expose_php = Off

Finally, restart Apache2 web server to reload updated PHP config file.

Now you will no longer see « X-Powered-By » field in HTTP response headers.

MySQL secure SSH

When users want to have a secure connection to their MySQL server, they often rely on VPN or SSH tunnels. Yet another option for securing MySQL connections is to enable SSL wrapper on an MySQL server. Each of these approaches has its own pros and cons. For example, in highly dynamic environments where a lot of short-lived MySQL connections occur, VPN or SSH tunnels may be a better choice than SSL as the latter involves expensive per-connection SSL handshake computation. On the other hand, for those applications with relatively few long-running MySQL connections, SSL based encryption can be reasonable. Since MySQL server already comes with built-in SSL support, you do not need to implement a separate security layer like VPN or SSH tunnel, which has their own maintenance overhead.

The implementation of SSL in an MySQL server encrypts all data going back and forth between a server and a client, thereby preventing potential eavesdropping or data sniffing in wide area networks or within data centers. In addition, SSL also provides identify verification by means of SSL certificates, which can protect users against possible phishing attacks.

In this article, we will show you how to enable SSL on MySQL server. Note that the same procedure is also applicable to MariaDB server.

Creating Server SSL Certificate and Private Key

We have to create an SSL certificate and private key for an MySQL server, which will be used when connecting to the server over SSL.

First, create a temporary working directory where we will keep the key and certificate files.

$ sudo mkdir ~/cert
$ cd ~/cert

Make sure that OpenSSL is installed on your system where an MySQL server is running. Normally all Linux distributions have OpenSSL installed by default. To check if OpenSSL is installed, use the following command.

$ openssl version
OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014

Now go ahead and create the CA private key and certificate. The following commands will create ca-key.pem and ca-cert.pem.

$ openssl genrsa 2048 > ca-key.pem
$ openssl req -sha1 -new -x509 -nodes -days 3650 -key ca-key.pem > ca-cert.pem

The second command will ask you several questions. It does not matter what you put in these field. Just fill out those fields.

The next step is to create a private key for the server.

$ openssl req -sha1 -newkey rsa:2048 -days 730 -nodes -keyout server-key.pem > server-req.pem

This command will ask several questions again, and you can put the same answers which you have provided in the previous step.

Next, export the server’s private key to RSA-type key with this command below.

$ openssl rsa -in server-key.pem -out server-key.pem

Finally, generate a server certificate using the CA certificate.

$ openssl x509 -sha1 -req -in server-req.pem -days 730 -CA ca-cert.pem -CAkey ca-key.pem -set_serial 01 > server-cert.pem

Lire la suite…

Neat tricks with iptables: The past few months have seen me digging deep into the world of TCP/IP and firewalls. It has been a fascinating journey into packet queueing and TCP headers, three-way handshakes and ICMP broadcasts.

The result of this research has been the ongoing creation of a firewall to protect my laptop against open networks, and my Internet server from port scanning and DoS attacks. I’m pretty certain I haven’t even scratched the surface yet, but I have found some settings to protect against the most common attacks. Below I’ll summarize the major pieces of my new firewall, and the logic behind it.

Address spoofing: win with iptables

The easiest way to fool a server is to construct a packet that whose source address is faked, or spoofed. This is surprisingly easy to do. To craft packets, I use a very powerful network analysis tool called Scapy. Scapy will allow you to create packets on the fly, transmit them, and scan your network for any response.

For example, let’s say I’m on my local network (which I am right now, as I write this), connected via wireless as192.168.15.113. I’m going to interact with the router, which is at 192.168.15.1. For the purposes of analysis, I’ve also setup a virtual machine running on 192.168.15.114, so I can see what happens when I spoof the packet.

So, let’s say I spoof an ICMP echo-request packet, sent to .1 (router) from .113 (me) but spoofed as if it had come from .114 (virtual machine). In Scapy this is quite easy to do. I run two scapy session in two terminal windows. In the first I type:

>>> send(IP(src="192.168.15.114", dst="192.168.15.1")/ICMP())
.
Sent 1 packets.

Although my machine is at .113, I’m telling scapy to set the source address for the ICMP echo-request packet to.114, which is the host I want to attack. I’m sending this “ping” to the router, which should now send its response back to .114 instead of me.

In my other terminal window, I run scapy again, this time in promiscuous mode as a packet sniffer. Promiscuous mode means that it will capture all packets seen on the network, not just those destined for my own machine. Here’s what I see:

>>> sniff(filter="icmp")
^C
>>> _.show()
0000 Ether / IP / ICMP 192.168.15.114 > 192.168.15.1 echo-request 0
0001 Ether / IP / ICMP 192.168.15.1 > 192.168.15.114 echo-reply 0

I ran the sniffer, then did the ping, then stopped the sniffer by pressing Control-C. I can see that two ICMP packets were seen during the sniff. By showing the contents of these packets, I can see both the packet that I transmitted, and the response – which came back to .114!

That’s a spoof. How can it be used to attack someone? Read on in the next section, since what we just did forms the basis for a smurf attack.

Some packet spoofs, however, are more obvious. For example, a packet coming from the Internet bound for a private IP address or certain broadcast addresses, such as address beginning with 192.168 or 224. These are never valid, so it’s a good idea to drop such packets immediately upon receipt. Here are the iptables rules to do this:

# Reject packets from RFC1918 class networks (i.e., spoofed)
iptables -A INPUT -s 10.0.0.0/8     -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -s 169.254.0.0/16 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -s 172.16.0.0/12  -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -s 127.0.0.0/8    -j DROP

iptables -A INPUT -s 224.0.0.0/4      -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -d 224.0.0.0/4      -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -s 240.0.0.0/5      -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -d 240.0.0.0/5      -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -s 0.0.0.0/8        -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -d 0.0.0.0/8        -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -d 239.255.255.0/24 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -d 255.255.255.255  -j DROP

Here’s the same thing, now for ipfw users:

# Verify the reverse path to help avoid spoofed packets.  This means any
# packet coming from a particular interface must have an address matching the
# netmask for that interface.
ipfw add 100 deny all from any to any not verrevpath in

# Deny all inbound traffic from RFC1918 address spaces (spoof!)
ipfw add 110 deny all from 192.168.0.0/16 to any in
ipfw add 120 deny all from 172.16.0.0/12 to any in
ipfw add 130 deny all from 10.0.0.0/8 to any in
ipfw add 140 deny all from 127.0.0.0/8 to any in

ipfw add 150 deny all from 224.0.0.0/4 to any in
ipfw add 160 deny all from any to 224.0.0.0/4 in
ipfw add 170 deny all from 240.0.0.0/5 to any in
ipfw add 180 deny all from any to 240.0.0.0/5 in
ipfw add 190 deny all from 0.0.0.0/8 to any in
ipfw add 200 deny all from any to 0.0.0.0/8 in
ipfw add 210 deny all from any to 239.255.255.0/24 in
ipfw add 220 deny all from any to 255.255.255.255 in

Lire la suite…

Source: Per Linde, Martynas Pumputis and Guillermo Rodr ́ıguez iptables revisited: a not so ordinary ‘firewall’

iptables revisited: Abstract

At the present time, security on the internet, and networks in general have evolved, and become an issue that should not be disregarded. It is well known that many experts recommend Linux as the main operating system for the machines that have to be in charge of security (also for a desktop computer). Linux included a basic firewall tool called ipchains in the series of its kernel until 2.4 version, though after that version it switched to iptables. iptables is known for its efficiency and functionality, but the enormous functionality means a more complex tool to be configured. This paper will overview some mechanisms to do advanced configuration of iptables based on two main scenarios. The different configurations presented will try to prove the remarkable power of iptables as an independent firewall and also as a tool that can work in conjuntion with other tools usually incorporated when included this one.

Introduction

iptables is a firewall developed by the Netfilter Project 1 . Presently, this firewall is becoming more and more popular (both among end users and network administrators). The popularity of this firewall it closely related to Linux operating system, because iptables works with Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6 and almost every major Linux distribution comes with pre-installed iptables firewall. This firewall is also known as a stateful packet filter. It is a main difference between iptables and ipchains (an ancestor of iptables that was used with Linux kernel versions up to 2.4). The firewall supports not only a packet filtering, but it is also able to log, forward packets and it could be used together with such tools as psad, snort, etc. In this paper we will look a bit deeper into more advance iptables configurations, but first of all, we would like to introduce a reader to a basic usage of iptables. The core of the firewall consists of four parts [7]: tables, chains, matches and targets. A system administrator is able to define an iptables policy, i.e. tables of chains, which describe how a kernel should react against different groups of packets. Rules are used to create a chain – collection of rules that is applied to every packet. There are five predefined chains:

• INPUT: used for incoming packets before routing.
• OUTPUT: used for packets coming into the box itself.
• FORWARD: used for packets being routed through the box.
• PREROUTING: used for locally-generated packets before routing.
• POSTROUTING: used for packets as they about to leave iptables.

Every rule should have a set of matches, that helps to filter packets (e.g. -d 10.100.1.1 matches a destination IP 10.100.1.1), and it also has to have a target – an action which should be performed when a rule matches on a packet (e.g. ACCEPT, DROP, LOG…). All the examples presented in this paper (excluding the one used at section 6) will be based on the scenario presented in the figure 1. In the following scenario, WebServer#1 (10.100.1.101 assigned to its ‘eth0’ interface), WebServer#2 (10.100.1.102 assigned to its ‘eth0’ interface) and PC (10.100.1.33 assigned to its ‘eth0’ interface) belong to a local network and every packet that comes from the Internet/LAN is filtered by the firewall (‘eth1’ interface for LAN’s traffic, ‘eth0’ for Internet’s traffic). PC (212.59.0.1 assigned to ‘eth0’ interface) is reachable directly through the Internet. The listing 1 shows a couple of rules, the first one appends a rule to the end of the INPUT chain and it specifies that every packet from the source with IP address 212.59.0.1 will beDROPed and the second rule logs all outgoing connections from eth1 interface.

iptables -A INPUT -s 212.59.0.1 -j DROP
iptables -A OUTPUT -o eth1 -j LOG

Lire la suite…

Last week during a casual conversation I overheard a colleague saying: « The Linux network stack is slow! You can’t expect it to do more than 50 thousand packets per second per core! »

That got me thinking. While I agree that 50kpps per core is probably the limit for any practical application, what is the Linux networking stack capable of? Let’s rephrase that to make it more fun:

On Linux, how hard is it to write a program that receives 1 million UDP packets per second?

Hopefully, answering this question will be a good lesson about the design of a modern networking stack.

First, let us assume:

• Measuring packets per second (pps) is much more interesting than measuring bytes per second (Bps). You can achieve high Bps by better pipelining and sending longer packets. Improving pps is much harder.
• Since we’re interested in pps, our experiments will use short UDP messages. To be precise: 32 bytes of UDP payload. That means 74 bytes on the Ethernet layer.
• For the experiments we will use two physical servers: « receiver » and « sender ».
• They both have two six core 2GHz Xeon processors. With hyperthreading (HT) enabled that counts to 24 processors on each box. The boxes have a multi-queue 10G network card by Solarflare, with 11 receive queues configured. More on that later.
• The source code of the test programs is available here: udpsender, udpreceiver.

Prerequisites

Let’s use port 4321 for our UDP packets. Before we start we must ensure the traffic won’t be interfered with by the iptables:

receiver$ iptables -I INPUT 1 -p udp --dport 4321 -j ACCEPT  
receiver$ iptables -t raw -I PREROUTING 1 -p udp --dport 4321 -j NOTRACK  

A couple of explicitly defined IP addresses will later become handy:

receiver$ for i in `seq 1 20`; do   
              ip addr add 192.168.254.$i/24 dev eth2; 
          done
sender$ ip addr add 192.168.254.30/24 dev eth3  

1. The naive approach

To start let’s do the simplest experiment. How many packets will be delivered for a naive send and receive?

The sender pseudo code:

fd = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)  
fd.bind(("0.0.0.0", 65400)) # select source port to reduce nondeterminism  
fd.connect(("192.168.254.1", 4321))  
while True:  
    fd.sendmmsg(["x00" * 32] * 1024)

While we could have used the usual send syscall, it wouldn’t be efficient. Context switches to the kernel have a cost and it is be better to avoid it. Fortunately a handy syscall was recently added to Linux: sendmmsg. It allows us to send many packets in one go. Let’s do 1,024 packets at once.

The receiver pseudo code:

fd = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)  
fd.bind(("0.0.0.0", 4321))  
while True:  
    packets = [None] * 1024
    fd.recvmmsg(packets, MSG_WAITFORONE)

Similarly, recvmmsg is a more efficient version of the common recv syscall.

Let’s try it out:

sender$ ./udpsender 192.168.254.1:4321  
receiver$ ./udpreceiver1 0.0.0.0:4321  
  0.352M pps  10.730MiB /  90.010Mb
  0.284M pps   8.655MiB /  72.603Mb
  0.262M pps   7.991MiB /  67.033Mb
  0.199M pps   6.081MiB /  51.013Mb
  0.195M pps   5.956MiB /  49.966Mb
  0.199M pps   6.060MiB /  50.836Mb
  0.200M pps   6.097MiB /  51.147Mb
  0.197M pps   6.021MiB /  50.509Mb

With the naive approach we can do between 197k and 350k pps. Not too bad. Unfortunately there is quite a bit of variability. It is caused by the kernel shuffling our programs between cores. Pinning the processes to CPUs will help:

sender$ taskset -c 1 ./udpsender 192.168.254.1:4321  
receiver$ taskset -c 1 ./udpreceiver1 0.0.0.0:4321  
  0.362M pps  11.058MiB /  92.760Mb
  0.374M pps  11.411MiB /  95.723Mb
  0.369M pps  11.252MiB /  94.389Mb
  0.370M pps  11.289MiB /  94.696Mb
  0.365M pps  11.152MiB /  93.552Mb
  0.360M pps  10.971MiB /  92.033Mb

Now, the kernel scheduler keeps the processes on the defined CPUs. This improves processor cache locality and makes the numbers more consistent, just what we wanted.

Lire la suite…