24 Feb 10 UDP Tunneling to avoid hotspot or firewall restrictions

UDP tunneling is an attack that is often overlooked when manufacturers design wireless hotspot and other firewall/proxy based devices.

When you try and resolve a domain name, you make a request to a name server on UDP port 53. The way that a lot of wireless hotspot, firewalls and proxies work, is that your DNS request is allowed out, you get the IP for the machine you’re looking for, and then your request to the IP is redirected to the wireless hotspot login page, or through a web proxy server.

The problem is, that all port 53 UDP traffic is allowed out to anywhere, without any kind of authentication. You can therefore install OpenVPN on a remote server which by default listens in on UDP port 1194. You can change this with one configuration option to 53, and then edit your client config to connect to the server on port 53 instead. Often, other TCP/UDP ports might be allowed out, and ICMP is also sometimes a possibility. It is possible to easily tunnel your data out over TCP, UDP or ICMP as a worst case.

This type of attack worked on 5 out of 6 different wireless hotspot systems to gain access without authentication.

The one that it didn’t work on, captured all outbound 53 UDP requests, and silently redirected them to it’s own local DNS server. This is simple enough to do, so I’m not sure why more manufacturers haven’t done the same. Using iptables:

${IPTABLES} -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p udp -m udp –dport 53 -j REDIRECT –to-port 53

These are the same type of rules used to configure transparent proxying for Squid.

Tags: 53, firewall, hotspot, iptables, openvpn, squid, transparent proxying, udp, udp tunneling

Reader's Comments

1. sileNT | 27 Feb 2010 1:54 am

   And where 53 UDP is blocked, but DNS works (i.e. queries going to a hotspot DNS server) you can always make a tunnel in… DNS queries – for example, with iodine.

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.