Tag Archives: LFT

Discovering Policy-Based Routes with Layer 4 Traceroutes (LFT)

I already published a few examples how you can use layer four traceroutes in order to pass firewall policies that block ping but allow some well-known ports such as 80 or 443. Long story short: Using TCP SYN packets on an opened firewall port with the TTL trick will probably succeed compared to a classical traceroute based on ICMP echo-requests.

Another nice use case for layer 4 traceroutes is the recognition of policy based routes within your own network (or even beyond). That is: Depending on the TCP/UDP port used for the traceroute you can reveal which paths your packets take over the network. This is quite useful compared to classical traceroutes that only reveal the straightforward routing tables but not the policy based ones.

Continue reading Discovering Policy-Based Routes with Layer 4 Traceroutes (LFT)

Advanced Tracerouting

A common misunderstanding of traceroute is that it fully relies on ping. “If I block ping at my firewall, no one can use traceroute to reveal my internal routing path”. Unfortunately, this is not true. If traceroute is used with TCP SYN packets on permitted TCP/UDP ports, all intermediary firewalls will handle the IP packets with TTL = 0 corresponding to the RFCs and will reply with an ICMP time exceeded packet to the source.

In this post, I am listing an example that uses traceroute with TCP port 25 (SMTP) to traverse a firewall. A sample pcap file can be downloaded while some Wireshark screenshots show a few details.

Continue reading Advanced Tracerouting