TLS Redirection and Dynamic Decryption Bypass in PolarProxy

PolarProxy is constantly being updated with new features, enhanced performance and bug fixes, but these updates are not always communicated other than as a short mention in the ChangeLog. I would therefore like to highlight a few recent additions to PolarProxy in this blog post.

Custom TLS Redirection

One new feature in PolarProxy is the --redirect argument, which can be used to redirect TLS traffic destined for a specific domain name to a different domain. This feature can be used to redirect TLS-encrypted malware traffic going to a known C2 domain to a local HTTPS sandbox instead, for example INetSim.

This --redirect argument will cause PolarProxy to terminate outgoing TLS traffic to malware-c2.com and redirect the decrypted traffic into a new TLS session going to inetsim.local instead. The “--leafcert noclone” argument forces PolarProxy to generate a fake X.509 certificate for “malware-c2.com” rather than sending a clone of the certificate received from the INetSim server to the malware implant.

Note: You also need to specify a proxy mode, such as -p for transparent proxy or --socks for SOCKS proxy, to make the command above work.

The --redirect argument can also be used to perform domain fronting, which is a clever method for hiding the true destination of HTTPS based communication, in order to circumvent censorship or for other reasons conceal who you’re communicating with. The following command can be used to set up a local socks proxy that redirects traffic destined for YouTube to google.com instead:

A browser configured to use PolarProxy as a SOCKS proxy will send HTTPS requests for youtube.com to PolarProxy, which then decrypts the TLS layer and re-encrypts the HTTP communication in a new TLS session directed at google.com instead. Someone who monitors the outgoing traffic from PolarProxy will assume that this is normal Google traffic, since the SNI as well as certificate will be for google.com. On the server side however, after having decrypted the TLS layer, Google will kindly forward the client’s original HTTP request for youtube.com to an endpoint that serves the content for YouTube.

Dynamic TLS Decryption Bypass

PolarProxy is designed to block TLS connections that it can’t decrypt, except for when the server’s domain name is explicitly marked for decryption bypass with the “--bypass” command line argument. However, as of recently PolarProxy also supports dynamic TLS decryption bypass using a form of fail-open mode. When this fail-open mode is enabled, PolarProxy attempts to intercept and decrypt proxied TLS traffic, but allows connections to bypass decryption if the same client-server pair has previously rejected PolarProxy’s certificate. This method is convenient when monitoring network traffic from applications that enforce certificate pinning or for some other reason can’t be configured to trust PolarProxy’s root CA – provided that it’s acceptable to let traffic that can’t be decrypted to pass through untouched rather than blocking it, of course.

The following command line option configures PolarProxy to allow new TLS connections to bypass decryption for one hour (3600 seconds) after previously having failed to decrypt traffic between the same client and server.

A simple way to verify this fail-open feature is to do a simple test with curl. It doesn’t matter if the client you’re testing on is Windows, Linux or macOS, since PolarProxy as well as curl is available for all three platforms.

Web browsers that don’t trust PolarProxy’s root CA will display a certificate warning the first time they visit a website that PolarProxy tries to decrypt traffic for.

But once the dynamic bypass has kicked in the user will no longer see a certificate warning when visiting the same website again, since traffic between that client and server is now end-to-end encrypted.

Handling of non-TLS traffic and Better Logging

Other new features in PolarProxy is the “--nontls” argument, which can be used to specify how to handle connections that doesn’t use TLS. The default action is to block non-TLS connections, but they can also be allowed to pass through (if the target host is known) or to forward the connection to a specific host and port. There is even a “--nontls encrypt” argument, which can be used to encrypt traffic that isn’t already TLS-encrypted before forwarding it to a specific host. This feature can be used as an alternative to stunnel to wrap traffic from applications that lack TLS support inside a TLS tunnel.

PolarProxy now also produces less output to stdout, unless -v is used, and error messages have been improved to be more specific and easier to understand.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Tuesday, 28 February 2023 13:42:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #PolarProxy​ #TLS​ #redirect​ #bypass​ #SNI​ #ASCII-art​

Reverse Proxy and TLS Termination

PolarProxy is primarily a TLS forward proxy, but it can also be used as a TLS termination proxy or reverse TLS proxy to intercept and decrypt incoming TLS traffic, such as HTTPS or IMAPS, before it is forwarded to a server. The proxied traffic can be accessed in decrypted form as a PCAP formatted data stream, which allows real-time analysis of the decrypted traffic by an IDS as well as post incident forensics with Wireshark.

PolarProxy version 0.8.15 and later can import an existing X.509 server certificate (aka leaf certificate or end-entity certificate) in order to perform the TLS decryption using a valid certificate signed by a trusted certificate authority. If no server certificate is provided, then PolarProxy falls back to generating server certificates on the fly and signing them with its own root CA certificate.

There are two principal ways to run PolarProxy as a reverse proxy, either as a TLS termination proxy or as a reverse proxy that decrypts and re-encrypts the traffic.

PolarProxy as a TLS Termination Proxy

The TLS termination proxy mode is useful in order to offload the task of performing TLS encryption to PolarProxy instead of doing the decryption on the web server. This mode can also be used when the proxied services don’t support TLS encryption, such as legacy web servers or servers hosting other unencrypted services that you want to secure with TLS.

The following command sequence shows how to create a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, convert it to the PKCS#12 format, and load the server certificate into PolarProxy to terminate incoming HTTPS connections. In this setup PolarProxy decrypts the TLS traffic and relays the HTTP traffic to the web server on TCP port 80.

Here’s a breakdown of the arguments sent to PolarProxy:

• --terminate : Terminate incoming TLS sessions and forward proxied traffic in unencrypted form.
• --connect 10.1.2.3 : Forward all proxied traffic to 10.1.2.3 instead of connecting to the host name provided in the SNI extension of the TLS ClientHello message.
• --nosni www.example.com : Treat incoming TLS sessions that don’t define a host name with the SNI extension as if they wanna to connect to “www.example.com”.
• --leafcert load:example.com,www.example.com:/etc/example.p12:PASSWORD : Use the server certificate “/etc/example.p12” for incoming connections to “example.com” and “www.example.com”.
• -p 443,80,80 : Listen on TCP port 443, save decrypted traffic in PCAP file as if it was directed to port 80, forward decrypted traffic to port 80.
• -o /var/log/TlsTerminationProxy/ : Save decrypted traffic to hourly rotated PCAP files in “/var/log/TlsTerminationProxy/”.

PolarProxy is a generic TLS proxy that doesn’t care what application layer protocol the TLS tunnel carries. So if you want to terminate the TLS encryption of incoming IMAPS sessions as well, then simply append an additional argument saying “-p 993,143,143” to also forward decrypted IMAP sessions to 10.1.2.3. This method can be used in order to wrap almost any TCP based protocol in a TLS tunnel, which can be useful for privacy reasons as well as to prevent network monitoring tools from detecting the actual application layer protocol.

PolarProxy as a Reverse TLS Proxy

There are setups for which it is preferable to also encrypt the internal sessions between PolarProxy and the final server. One such setup is when the server is hosting a web service with support for the HTTP/2 protocol, which in practice always uses TLS. Luckily PolarProxy is designed to decrypt and re-encrypt proxied traffic while also forwarding important TLS parameters, such as ALPN and SNI, between the internal and external TLS sessions.

To use TLS encryption on the inside as well as outside of PolarProxy, simply do as explained in the previous TLS termination section, but remove the “--terminate” argument and change the port argument to “-p 443,80,443” like this:

PolarProxy will save the decrypted traffic as cleartext HTTP (or HTTP/2) to PCAP files in the “/var/log/ReverseTlsProxy/” directory.

Real-Time Analysis of Decrypted Traffic

Both the external (client-to-proxy) and internal (proxy-to-server) TCP sessions, in the reverse TLS proxy example above, are encrypted with TLS. This prevents passive network security monitoring tools, such as IDSs, DPI and DLP appliances, from analyzing the application layer data being sent and received. The PCAP files written to “/var/log/ReverseTlsProxy/” can be a valuable forensic asset when investigating an incident, but a real-time stream of the decrypted data is needed in order to swiftly detect and alert on potential security breaches and other incidents.

PolarProxy’s “--pcapoverip” option can be used to provide such a real-time stream of the decrypted data passing through the proxy. This data can easily be sent to a network interface using tcpreplay, as explained in our blog post “Sniffing Decrypted TLS Traffic with Security Onion”.

Security Considerations

The examples shown in this blog post all run PolarProxy with root privileges using sudo, which can be dangerous from a security perspective. PolarProxy is actually designed to be run without root privileges, but doing so prevents it from listening on a port below 1024. Luckily, this issue can easily be overcome with a simple port forwarding or redirect rule. The following iptables redirect rule can be used if PolarProxy is listening on TCP port 20443 and incoming HTTPS request are arriving to the eth0 interface of the proxy:

PolarProxy does not support loading settings from a config file. The password for the PKCS12 certificate will therefore need to be supplied on the command line, which can make it visible from a process listing. If this is a concern for you, then please consider using “hidepid” to hide processes from other users. You can find instructions on how to use hidepid in hardening guides for Debian, Arch, SUSE and most other Linux flavors.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 12 March 2020 15:45:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #PolarProxy​ #TLS​ #SSL​ #PCAP​ #decrypt​ #HTTPS​ #HTTP​ #HTTP/2​ #http2​ #IMAPS​ #SNI​ #decrypt​ #ASCII-art​