Port Forwarding

Port forwarding allows a host to access remote network resources while masquerading as the session endpoint.

SSH allows remote and local port forwarding over an existing connection:

  • Local port forwarding will allow the client to access network resources over a local port while masquerading as the server.

_images/ssh_local_port_forward.png

  • Remote port forwarding will allow the server to access network resources over an open port (on the server) masquerading as the client.

_images/ssh_remote_port_forward.png

Note

With ssh-mitm standard ssh client port forwarding features are seamlessly implemented so that no further configuration of the ssh-mit server is needed.

Proxyjump

Functionality implemented as part of the ClientTunnelForwarder. This variation of a local port forward assumes that the to-be established connection over the port forward is a ssh connection and therefore uses the master channel as a direct-tcpip channel to the jumphost (stdin and stdout are connected to the direct-tcpip channel). The jumphost will therefore not receive a formal shell-session channel request.

Injectable Forwarders

When using the InjectableClientTunnelForwarder and InjectableServerTunnelForwarder plugins of the ssh-mitm server one is able to use port forwarding of the session to make requests from the mitm server masquerading as the remote host or the client.

1
$ ssh-mitm --client-tunnel inject --tunnel-client-dest google.com:80 --server-tunnel inject

Using this configuration the ssh-mitm server will open ports on the designated network that will directly correlate to a port forward request to a given destination.

_images/ssh-mitm_client_port_inject.png
_images/ssh-mitm_server_port_inject.png

The InjectableClientTunnelForwarder can be used always, even if the ssh client is not even actively using the port forwarding feature. Furthermore the --tunnel-client-dest parameter can receive a space-separated list of destination targets (e.g. google.com:80). The ssh-mitm server will then open a port for each destination.

The implementation of the InjectableServerTunnelForwarder currently only opens one port for injecting into a remote port forwarding session opened by the client.