Advanced usage cases
SSH-MITM is capable of advanced man-in-the-middle attacks. It can be used in scenarios where the remote host is not known or a single remote host is not sufficient.
Transparent proxy
To intercept ssh sessions, where the destination is not known, SSH-MITM can run in transparent mode, which uses the TProxy kernel feature from Linux.
Transparent proxying often involves “intercepting” traffic on a router. When redirecting packets to a local socket, the destination address will be rewritten to the routers address.
To intercept ssh connections on a network, this is not acceptable. By using TProxy from the Linux Kernel, SSH-MITM can intercept ssh connections without losing the destination address.
Note
To intercept the traffic, a static route can be configured on a router. An alternative to a static route is using arp spoofing.
Router configuration and arp spoofing are not part of this documentation.
Setting up firewall rules
To setup SSH-MITM in transparent mode, the system has to be prepared.
Using iptables:
$ iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 22 -j TPROXY --tproxy-mark 0x1/0x1 --on-port=10022 --on-ip=127.0.0.1
Using firewalld
firewall-cmd --direct --permanent --add-rule ipv4 mangle PREROUTING 1 -p tcp --dport 22 --j TPROXY --tproxy-mark 0x1/0x1 --on-port=10022 --on-ip=127.0.0.1
Warning
Additional firewall rules may be necessary to maintain device management capabilities over ssh
Note
To process the packets locally, further routing needs to take place:
$ echo 100 tproxy >> /etc/iproute2/rt_tables
$ ip rule add fwmark 1 lookup tproxy
$ ip route add local 0.0.0.0/0 dev lo table tproxy
Now only the ssh proxy server needs to be started in transparent mode to be able to handle sockets that do not have local addresses:
$ ssh-mitm --transparent
By using the transparent mode, no remote host must be specified. If the --remote-host parameter is used,
all incoming connections are redirected to the same remote host.
Debug git and rsync
Sometimes it’s interesting to debug git or rsync.
Starting with version 5.4, SSH-MITM is able to intercept ssh commands like git or rsync.
Performing a git pull or rsync with a remote server only executes a remote ssh command and the file transfer is part of the communication.
There is also a new plugin debug_traffic to debug the traffic of ssh commands.
ssh-mitm --scp-interface debug_traffic
Note
SCP file transfers are executed as ssh command. This is the reason why the debug_traffic plugin is implemented as a scp-interface plugin.
Intercept git
In most cased, when git is used over ssh, publickey authentication is used. The default git command does not have a forward agent parameter.
To enable agent forwarding, git has to be executed with the GIT_SSH_COMMAND environment variable.
# start the ssh server
ssh-mitm --remote-host github.com:PORT --scp-interface debug_traffic
# invoke git commands
GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -A" git clone ssh://git@127.0.0.1:10022/ssh-mitm/ssh-mitm.git
Intercept rsync
When SSH-MITM is used to intercept rsync, the port must be provided as a parameter to rsync. Also the agent can be forwarded, if needed.
To sync a local directory with a remote directory, rsync can be executed with following parameters.
rsync -r -e 'ssh -p 10022 -A' /local/folder/ user@127.0.0.1:/remote/folder/
Further steps
SSH-MITM has some client exploits integrated, which can be used to audit various ssh clients like OpenSSH and PuTTY.