redteaming – harmj0y

Not A Security Boundary: Breaking Forest Trusts

Published November 28, 2018 by harmj0y

For years Microsoft has stated that the forest was the security boundary in Active Directory. For example, Microsoft’s “What Are Domains and Forests?” document (last updated in 2014) has a “Forests as Security Boundaries” section which states (emphasis added): Each forest is a single instance of the directory, the top-level Active Directory container, and a security boundary for all objects that are located in the forest. This security boundary defines the scope of authority of the administrators. In general, a security boundary is defined by the top-level container for which no administrator external to the container can take control away…

Another Word on Delegation

Published October 25, 2018 by harmj0y

Every time I think I start to understand Active Directory and Kerberos, a new topic pops up to mess with my head. A few weeks ago, @elad_shamir contacted @tifkin_ and myself with some ideas about resource-based Kerberos constrained delegation. Thanks to Elad’s ideas, the great back and forth, and his awesome pull request to Rubeus, we now understand this attack vector and have a tool to abuse it. We also now have something @_wald0, @cptjesus, and I have wanted for a long while- an ACL-based computer object takeover primitive! But first, some background on delegation and a dive into its resource-based flavor. Delegation…

Rubeus – Now With More Kekeo

Published October 4, 2018 by harmj0y

Rubeus, my C# port of some of features from @gentilkiwi‘s Kekeo toolset, already has a few new updates in its 1.1.0 release, and another new feature in its 1.2.0 release. This post will cover the main new features as well as any miscellaneous changes, and will dive a bit into the coolest new features- fake delegation TGTs and Kerberos based password changes. As before, I want to stress that @gentilkiwi is the originator of these techniques, and this is project is only a reimplementation of his work. If it wasn’t for Kekeo, I would never have been able to figure out these…

From Kekeo to Rubeus

Published September 24, 2018 by harmj0y

Kekeo, the other big project from Benjamin Delpy after Mimikatz, is an awesome code base with a set of great features. As Benjamin states, it’s external to the Mimikatz codebase because, “I hate to code network related stuff ; It uses an external commercial ASN.1 library inside.“ Kekeo provides (feature list not complete): The ability to request ticket-granting-tickets (TGTs) from user hashes (rc4_hmac/aes128_cts_hmac_sha1/aes256_cts_hmac_sha1) as well as applying requested TGTs to the current logon session. This provides an alternative to Mimikatz’ “over-pass-the-hash” that doesn’t manipulate LSASS’ memory and doesn’t require administrative privileges. The ability to request service tickets from existing TGTs. The only S4U…

Operational Guidance for Offensive User DPAPI Abuse

Published August 22, 2018 by harmj0y

I’ve spoken about DPAPI (the Data Protection Application Programming Interface) a bit before, including how KeePass uses DPAPI for its “Windows User Account” key option. I recently dove into some of the amazing work that Benjamin Delpy has done concerning DPAPI and wanted to record some operational notes on abusing DPAPI with Mimikatz. Note: I am focusing on user-based DPAPI abuse in this post, but at some point I intend to dive into abuse of the machine’s DPAPI key as well. If I am able to get my head around that particular set of abuses, I will draft a follow-up post. Another note:…

GhostPack

Published July 24, 2018 by harmj0y

Anyone who has followed myself or my teammates at SpecterOps for a while knows that we’re fairly big fans of PowerShell. I’ve been involved in offensive PowerShell for about 4 years, @mattifestation was the founder of PowerSploit and various defensive projects, @jaredcatkinson has been writing defensive PowerShell for years, and many of my teammates (@tifkin_, @enigma0x3, rvrsh3ll, @xorrior, @andrewchiles, and others) have written various security-related PowerShell projects over the past several years, totaling thousands of lines of code. By now, the reason for choosing PowerShell should be fairly self-evident; the language is Turing-complete, built into modern Windows operating systems, and…

A Guide to Attacking Domain Trusts

Published October 30, 2017 by harmj0y

It’s been a while (nearly 2 years) since I wrote a post purely on Active Directory domain trusts. After diving into group scoping, I realized a few subtle misconceptions I previously had concerning trusts and group memberships. That, combined with the changes made to PowerView last year, convinced me to publish an up-to-date guide on enumerating and attacking domain trusts. This will likely be the last post focusing on domain trusts I publish for a while, and at over 8000 words, it’s not exactly a light read (not that anyone reads long posts ;) In general, I don’t just blog my operational…

Offensive Encrypted Data Storage (DPAPI edition)

Published July 31, 2017 by harmj0y

Last September I wrote a post titled “Offensive Encrypted Data Storage” that detailed an approach to securely storing data on disk during offensive engagements. I recently revisited the idea a bit while once again thinking about disk artifacts, and remembered about DPAPI. The Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI) provides a simplified set of cryptographic functions that abstracts away concerns about deriving/storing keys, and removes the need to include additional libraries to use this functionality. DPAPI uses either the user’s current logon credential or the the randomized machine account password (depending on the “scope” passed to the functions) to protect, by…

Pass-the-Hash Is Dead: Long Live LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Published March 16, 2017 by harmj0y

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post named “Pass-the-Hash is Dead: Long Live Pass-the-Hash” that detailed some operational implications of Microsoft’s KB2871997 patch. A specific sentence in the security advisory, “Changes to this feature include: prevent network logon and remote interactive logon to domain-joined machine using local accounts…” led me to believe (for the last 3 years) that the patch modified Windows 7 and Server 2008 behavior to prevent the ability to pass-the-hash with non-RID 500 local administrator accounts. My colleague Lee Christensen recently pointed out that this was actually incorrect, despite Microsoft’s wording, and that the situation is…

Offensive Encrypted Data Storage

Published September 6, 2016 by harmj0y

We generally try to keep off of disk as much as possible on engagements- there’s less to clean up and fewer chances of being caught. However, occasionally we have a need to store data on disk on a target system, and we want to try to do this in a secure way in case any incident responders start to catch on. Examples would be reboot-persistent keyloggers, something that monitors locations for specific files and clones/exfiltrates them, and the pilfering of KeePass files (see the Example: KeePass + EncryptedStore section below). If we have to write a file to disk, we…

Category: redteaming