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Exploring VPNs ! [Testing & Enumeration]

Today we will discuss discovering and testing the Virtual Private Network (VPN) systems.

Several years ago, when a branch office wanted to connect to the head office, it needed to set a dedicated network line between the branch and head offices. The main disadvantage of this method is the cost; a dedicated network line is expensive.

A VPN allows a branch office to connect to the head office using the public network (Internet). The cost of using a public network is much cheaper than using a dedicated line. With the VPN, the branch office will be able to use the application in the headquarters as if the branch office is located in the Local Area Network (LAN). The connection established is protected by encryption.

Based on the method used, VPN can be divided into at least three groups:

  • IPsec-based VPN: This is a popular VPN solution for connecting the branch office to the head office’s LAN. The branch office will install an IPsec VPN client on the network gateway, while the head office will install an IPsec VPN server on its network gateway. It is not a popular method to connect a user to the head office’s LAN due to the complexity of configuring the method. The user using this method are called a road warrior.
  • OpenVPN: This type is a very popular VPN solution for road warriors. In OpenVPN, a user needs to install an OpenVPN client before being able to connect to the VPN server. The advantage of this mode is that it is very easy to set up and doesn’t need an administrator-level privilege to run.
  • SSL-based VPN: In this category, the user doesn’t need a dedicated VPN client but can use a web browser to connect to the VPN server as long as the web browser supports an SSL connection.

Ike-scan

An ike-scan tool is a security tool that can be used to discover, fingerprint, and test the IPsec VPN systems. IPsec is the most commonly used technology for LAN-to-LAN and remote access VPN solutions.

IPsec uses three major protocols, as follows:

  • Authentication Headers (AH): This provides data integrity
  • Encapsulating Security Payloads (ESP): This provides data integrity and confidentiality

Internet Key Exchange (IKE): This provides support for the negotiation of parameters between endpoints; it establishes, maintains, and terminates the Security Association (SA)

IKE establishes security association through the following phases:

IKE Phase 1: This sets up a secure channel between two IPsec endpoints by the negotiation of parameters, such as the encryption algorithm, integrity algorithm, authentication type, key distribution mechanism, and lifetime. To establish the bidirectional security association, IKE phase 1 can either use the main mode or aggressive mode. The main mode negotiates SA through three pairs of messages, while the aggressive mode provides faster operations through the exchange of three messages.

  • IKE Phase 2: This is used for data protection.
  • IKE phase 1.5 or the extended authentication phase: This is an optional phase and is commonly used in the remote access VPN solutions.

The ike-scan tool works by sending IKE phase 1 packets to the VPN servers and displaying any responses it receives.

The following are several features of ike-scan:

Ability to send the IKE packets to any number of destination hosts

Ability to construct the outgoing IKE packets in a flexible way

Ability to decode and display any response packets

Ability to crack the aggressive mode pre-shared keys with the help of the PSK-crack tool

In short, the ike-scan tool is capable of two things:

  • Discovery: Finding hosts running the IKE by displaying the hosts that respond to the IKE request.
  • Fingerprint: Identifying the IKE implementation used by the IPsec VPN server. Usually, this information contains the VPN vendor and the model of the VPN server. This is useful for later use in the vulnerability analysis process.

The reason why you need a tool such as ike-scan is that in general, port scanners will not be able to find an IPsec VPN server because these servers don’t listen on any TCP ports. Also, they don’t send an ICMP unreachable error message, so UDP scans will not find them either. Also, if you try to send random garbage data to the UDP port 500 or IP protocols 50 and 51, you will not receive a response. So, the only way to find the IPsec VPN server is using a tool that can send an exact formatted IKE packet and display responses that are received from that server.

To start the ike-scan command line, you can use the console to execute the following command:

Ike-scan

This will display a simple usage instruction and example on your screen.

As our exercise, we are going to discover, fingerprint, and test an IPsec VPN server using the following command:

Ike-scan -M -A –Pike-hashkey 192.168.0.10

The command has the following options set:

-M: This splits the payload decoded across multiple lines to make the output easier to read

-A: This uses the IKE aggressive mode

-P: This saves the aggressive mode pre-shared key to this file

The following screenshot shows the output:

The interesting information is contained in the SA payload, as follows:

Encryption: 3DES

Hash: SHA1

Auth: PSK           

Diffie-Hellman group: 2

SA life time: 28800 seconds

The pre-shared key is saved in the ike-hashkey file.

The next step is to crack the hash to get the password to connect to the VPN server. For this purpose, we can use the psk-crack tool, as follows:

Psk-crack –d rockyou.txt ike-hashkey

Here, -d is the wordlist file.

The following screenshot shows the result of this command:

From the output, we notice that the key is 123456. You can then use this key to connect to the VPN server.

The next task is to fingerprint the VPN server. For this purpose, we need to define the transform attributes until we find one which is acceptable

The following is the command to fingerprint the IPsec VPN server based on the previous SA payload:

Ike-scan -M –trans=5, 2, 1, 2 –showbackoff 192.168.0.10

The following screenshot shows the result of this command:

The ike-scan tool is able to guess the remote VPN server software used: FreeS/ WAN, OpenSwan, or strongSwan.

 

I hope this article helps you…

Happy Hacking!!!

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