Send binary data as HTTP and pass firewall - firewall

My game communicates with server through 4567 port using TCP custom binary protocol and some clients cannot play game. I think that is because of firewalls.
Later I will use 80 port and want to know: does firewall intruse into transmitting data and is there possibility that he will block non-HTTP data? If it is, how can I send my binary data within HTTP and will not firewall block even such data?
Thank you.

Depends whether you want to ACCEPT INCOMING connections or just want to use port 80 for OUTGOING connections. Most Firewalls block any incoming connections by default (plus most home-routers are configured to do so, too).
For outgoing connections, however, the default behavior of the most popular Firewalls is to block and ask the user for permission for the program, unless it is run with administrative privileges (in which case the user already had to grant the program almost full control over the computer anyway). But it depends on the Firewall in question.

Related

Is there a way to test if a computer's connection is firewalled?

I'm writing a piece of P2P software, which requires a direct connection to the Internet. It is decentralized, so there is no always-on server that it can contact with a request for the server to attempt to connect back to it in order to observe if the connection attempt arrives.
Is there a way to test the connection for firewall status?
I'm thinking in my dream land where wishes were horses, there would be some sort of 3rd-party, public, already existent servers to whom I could send some sort of simple command, and they would send a special ping back. Then I could simply listen to see if that arrives and know whether I'm behind a firewall.
Even if such a thing does not exist, are there any alternative routes available?
Nantucket - does your service listen on UDP or TCP?
For UDP - what you are sort of describing is something the STUN protocol was designed for. It matches your definition of "some sort of simple command, and they would send a special ping back"
STUN is a very "ping like" (UDP) protocol for a server to echo back to a client what IP and port it sees the client as. The client can then use the response from the server and compare the result with what it thinks its locally enumerated IP address is. If the server's response matches the locally enumerated IP address, the client host can self determinte that it is directly connected to the Internet. Otherwise, the client must assume it is behind a NAT - but for the majority of routers, you have just created a port mapping that can be used for other P2P connection scenarios.
Further, you can you use the RESPONSE-PORT attribute in the STUN binding request for the server to respond back to a different port. This will effectively allow you to detect if you are firewalled or not.
TCP - this gets a little tricky. STUN can partially be used to determine if you are behind a NAT. Or simply making an http request to whatismyip.com and parsing the result to see if there's a NAT. But it gets tricky, as there's no service on the internet that I know of that will test a TCP connection back to you.
With all the above in mind, the vast majority of broadband users are likely behind a NAT that also acts as a firewall. Either given by their ISP or their own wireless router device. And even if they are not, most operating systems have some sort of minimal firewall to block unsolicited traffic. So it's very limiting to have a P2P client out there than can only work on direct connections.
With that said, on Windows (and likely others), you can program your app's install package can register with the Windows firewall so your it is not blocked. But if you aren't targeting Windows, you may have to ask the user to manually fix his firewall software.
Oh shameless plug. You can use this open source STUN server and client library which supports all of the semantics described above. Follow up with me offline if you need access to a stun service.
You might find this article useful
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364726%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
I would start with each os and ask if firewall services are turned on. Secondly, I would attempt the socket connections and determine from the error codes if connections are being reset or timeout. I'm only familiar with winsock coding, so I can't really say much for Linux or mac os.

Raw sockets need root priviliege

Why do we need root privileges when we use raw sockets ?
It's because you can spoof custom packets, which may interfere with inbound traffic. This too is also bad.
In short raw sockets is restricted to root because if it otherwise it would break other rules for networking that are in place.
A long standing rule is that you cannot bind on a port lower than 1024 without root's blessing. With raw sockets you can simulate a server on any port. (naturally being able to receive on this port is a different story you'd also have to sniff the network, but perhaps this could be done with a different machine.)
Opening a raw socket allows to read anything that is received in a given interface, so, basically, you can read any packet that is directed to any application - even if that application is owned by another user. That basically means that the user with this capability is able to read any and all communications of all users.

Remote port blocking in firewalls?

some guys use a firewall on their laptops which not only blocks their own local incoming ports (except those they need for their application) but also blocks messages unless they are issued from a distinct port number. We're talking about a local UDP server which is listening to UDP broadcasts.
The problem is that the remote client uses a random port, say 1024, which is blocked unless they tell the firewall to accept it.
What puzzles me is that as far as I know from using sockets in my programs is that usually the client gets its port number from the OS, whereas only when you have a server, you bind your socket to a distinct port, right?
In my literature and in tutorials and code snippets in the web I haven't found any clue that clients should be using fixed port numbers at all.
So how is this in reality? Am I probably missing a point?
Are there client applications around using fixed ports?
Is is actually useful to block remote ports with a firewall?
And if yes, what level of added security does this give to you?
Thanks for enlightenment in beforehand...
Although the default API's allow the network stack to select a local port for client connections, clients may specify a fixed port for various reasons.
Some specifications (FTP) specify a fixed port for clients. Most servers don't care if clients get this correct.
Some clients use a fixed pool of ports for egress from a LAN to the Internet. This allows firewall rules to more completely lock down outbound traffic.
Source ports are sometimes uses as a weak type of "security through obscurity".
You always get a random address and/or port when not explicitly having bound to one before sending.
Daemons are usually bound to a fixed port, so that:
you can actually contact them without having to try all possible ports or utilize a secondary resolver (remember the SUNRPC portmapping crap?)
and because a TCP socket is not allowed to listen() if it has not bound to a port, IIRC.
Are there client applications around using fixed ports?
Some can be configured so, like BIND9.
useful to block remote ports with a firewall?
No, because your peer may choose any port of his. Block him and you'll lose a customer, so to speak.

NAT, P2P and Multiplayer

How can an application be designed such that two peers can communicate directly with each other (assuming both know each other's IPs), but without outgoing connections? That's, no ports will be opened. Bitorrent for example does it, but multiplayer games (as far as I know) require port forwarding.
I'm not sure what you mean by No Outgoing Connections, I'm going to assume like everyone else you meant no Incoming Connections (they are behind a NAT/FW/etc).
The most common one mentioned so far is UPNP, which in this context is a protocol that allows you as a computer to talk to the Gateway and say forward me this port because I want someone on the outside to be able to talk to me. UPNP is also designed for other things, but this is the common thing for home networking (Actually it's one of many definitions).
There are also more common and slightly more reliable ways if you don't own the network. The most common is called STUN but if I recall correctly there are a few variants. Basically you use a third party server that allows incoming connections to try and coordinate a communication channel. Basically, what you do is send a UDP packet to you're peer, which will open up you're NAT for a response, but gets dropped on you're peer's NAT (since no forwarding rule exists yet). Through the connection to the intermediary, they are then told to do the same, which now opens up their NAT, and matches the existing rule in you're NAT. Now the communications can proceed. Their is a variant of this which will allow a TCP/IP connection as well by sending SYN and SYN-ACK messages with some coordination.
The Wikipedia articles I've linked to has links to the relevant rfc's for these protocols on precisely how they work. Essentially it comes down to, there isn't an easy answer, as this is a very network centric problem.
You need a "meeting point" in the network somewhere: the participants "meet" at a "gateway" of some sort and the said "gateway function" takes care of the forwarding.
At least that's one way of doing it: I won't try to comment on the details of Bittorrent... I am sure you can google for links.
UPNP dealt with this mostly in the recent years, but the need to open ports is because the application has been coded to listen on a specific port for a response.
Ports beneath 1024 are called "registered" because they've been assigned a port number because a company paid for it. This doesn't mean you couldn't use port 53 for a webserver or SSH, just that most will assume when they see it that they are dealing with DNS. Ports above 1024 are unregistered, so there's no association - your web browser, be it Internet Explorer/Firefox/etc, is using an unregistered port to send the request to the StackOverflow webserver(s) on port 80. You can use:
netstat -a
..on windows hosts to see what network connections are currently established, including the port involved.
UPNP can be used to negotiate with the router to open and forward a port to your application. Even bit-torrent needs at least one of the peers to have an open port to enable p2p connections. There is no need for both peers to have an open port however, since they both communicate with the same server (tracker) that lets them negotiate and determine who has an open port.
An alternative is an echo-server / relay-server somewhere on the internet that both peers trust, and have that relay all the traffic.
The "problem" with this solution is that the echo-server needs to have lots of bandwidth to accomodate all connected peers since it relays all the traffic rather than establish p2p connections.
Check out EchoWare: http://www.echogent.com/tech.htm

Should a web server's firewall block outbound HTTP traffic over port 80?

I understand the need for putting a web server in a DMZ and blocking inbound traffic to all ports except 80 and 443. I can also see why you should probably also block most outbound traffic in case the server is compromised.
But is it necessary to block outbound HTTP traffic over port 80? If so, why? A lot of web applications these days rely on sending/retrieving data from external web services and APIs, so blocking outbound traffic over port 80 would prevent this capability. Is there a security concern that's valid enough to justify this?
The only reason I can think of is if your machine is somehow compromomised remotely then it won't be able to DDoS another website on port 80. It's not something I normally do though.
Rather then blocking it, throttle it. Use iptables -m limit.
I have several web apps that invoke external web services, so I would say it's a bad idea to block output HTTP traffic. If you're concerned with security, you could block it and allow for only certain destinations.
Depending on your SQL version, you could have certificate authentication time out issues with SQL server 2005.
First - I agree with #vartec on throttling "Rather then blocking it, throttle it. Use iptables -m limit" as at least part of the solution.
However I can offer another reason to not block port 80 outbound at all times. If you have automatic security updates turned on the server can't reach out to PPAs over port 80 to initiate a security update. Thus if you have automatic security updates set up they won't run. On ubuntu auto-security updates are turned on in 14.04 LTS with:
sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades update-notifier-common && \
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades
(then select "YES")
More graceful solutions would be ansible scripts opening the port automatically, possibly also modifying an AWS security group rule via the CLI in addition to iptables if you are at AWS. I prefer modifying my outbound rules temporarily via AWS CLI initiated by a stealth box. This forces logging the update up in my AWS S3 log buckets but never shows up in the logs on the server itself. Further the server that initiates the update doesn't even have to be in the private subnet ACL.
Maybe do both? You have to figure at times an attack is going to relay off an internal IP in your subnet so there is merit to doubling down while preserving the ability to automate backups and security updates.
I hope this helps. If not reply and provide more code examples to be more specific and exact. #staysafe !
If the machine is compromised and outbound traffic on port 80 is allowed, it would make it easier for intruders to send back harvested data to themselves. Allowing outbound traffic means you can initiate a connection from your machine to the outside world. A better approach would be allowing outbound traffic only to certain web sites/addresses that you trust (i.e. Microsoft Windows Update, Google reCAPTCHA) rather than any destination in the world.
what do you mean with blocking outbound traffic over port 80.
You have two possibilities. Gernerate Dynamic Rules which allow communication from client to your webserver for this session. Search for Stateful firewall rules.
Or you generally allow established Connections to communicate in and outgoing with each other.
If you generally block all outbound traffic over Port 80 your Webserver could not reply to any client.
The other way around, if your Webserver needs to get some API, e.g. a jquery library he wont use port 80 as his Port to communicate with the Webserver who holds the API.
Your Webserver would normally choose a port > 1024 and use it for his request to get the API from the remote Server.
So blocking all traffic over port 80 (as your port you connecting from) would not prevent your Server from sending any requests for apis and such things. because he doesnt use port 80 when he acts as a client.

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