I have a sniffer in C++ where I'm getting the Source IP, Destination IP, Control Bit, and Sequence number. I am also getting the IP header and then the TCP info. I want to get the content type of the packets. Do I need to reassemble the packets to do that? Or can I use http request and respond to get the content type of the packets. Any help is appreciated, thank you!
There is no "content type". TCP will only provide an octet stream for the layer above TCP to interpret. If you are sniffing HTTP over TCP, you will have to assemble the packets, and parse the HTTP yourself.
Have you considered using Wireshark?
Update
By assembling the TCP packets into the octet stream, you basically append the payload of the TCP packets into one big byte array. Make sure you pay attention to the sequence number of the TCP packets, because the packets may arrive out of order.
Parsing the HTTP content is much trickier. The first headers are always in ASCII. They specify the content type and content length. It's the content type part that is tricky. Stuff may be encoded in a variety of encoding techniques, and they may be enveloped with yet another encoding technique (zip stream, SSL, etc).
TCP RFC: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc793.html
HTTP 1.1 RFC: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html
It might be a good idea to see how both Wireshark and WinPcap does it. I'm not sure if WinPcap contains filters and decoders for HTTP (basically bringing you the content of the HTTP) or not. At any rate, it might be worth checking out the code.
Related
Is it possible to send a SYN packet with self-defined payload when initiating TCP connections? My gut feeling is that it is doable theoretically. I'm looking for a easy way to achieve this goal in Linux (with C or perhaps Go language) but because it is not a standard behavior, I didn't find helpful information yet. (This post is quite similar while it is not very helpful.)
Please help me, thanks!
EDIT: Sorry for the ambiguity. Not only the possibility for such task, I'm also looking for a way, or even sample codes to achieve it.
As far as I understand (and as written in a comment by Jeff Bencteux in another answer), TCP Fast Open addresses this for TCP.
See this LWN article:
Eliminating a round trip
Theoretically, the initial SYN segment could contain data sent by the initiator of the connection: RFC 793, the specification for TCP, does permit data to be included in a SYN segment. However, TCP is prohibited from delivering that data to the application until the three-way handshake completes.
...
The aim of TFO is to eliminate one round trip time from a TCP conversation by allowing data to be included as part of the SYN segment that initiates the connection.
Obviously if you write your own software on both sides, it is possible to make it work however you want. But if you are relying on standard software on either end (such as, for example, a standard linux or Windows kernel), then no, it isn't possible, because according to TCP, you cannot send data until the session is established, and the session isn't established until you get an acknowledgment to your SYN from the other peer.
So, for example, if you send a SYN packet that also includes additional payload to a linux kernel (caveat: this is speculation to some extent since I haven't actually tried it), it will simply ignore the payload and proceed to acknowledge (SYN/ACK) or reject (with RST) the SYN depending on whether there's a listener.
In any case, you could try this, but since you're going "off the reservation" so to speak, you would need to craft your own raw packets; you won't be able to convince your local OS to create them for you.
The python scapy package could construct it:
#!/usr/bin/env python2
from scapy.all import *
sport = 3377
dport = 2222
src = "192.168.40.2"
dst = "192.168.40.135"
ether = Ether(type=0x800, dst="00:0c:29:60:57:04", src="00:0c:29:78:b0:ff")
ip = IP(src=src, dst=dst)
SYN = TCP(sport=sport, dport=dport, flags='S', seq=1000)
xsyn = ether / ip / SYN / "Some Data"
packet = xsyn.build()
print(repr(packet))
TCP Fast open do that. But both ends should speak TCP fast open. QUIC a new protocol is based to solve this problem AKA 0-RTT.
I had previously stated it was not possible. In the general sense, I stand by that assessment.
However, for the client, it is actually just not possible using the connect() API. There is an alternative connect API when using TCP Fast Open. Example:
sfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
sendto(sfd, data, data_len, MSG_FASTOPEN,
(struct sockaddr *) &server_addr, addr_len);
// Replaces connect() + send()/write()
// read and write further data on connected socket sfd
close(sfd);
There is no API to allow the server to attach data to the SYN-ACK sent to the client.
Even so, enabling TCP Fast Open on both the client and server may allow you to achieve your desired result, if you only mean data from the client, but it has its own issues.
If you want the same reliability and data stream semantics of TCP, you will need a new reliable protocol that has the initial data segment in addition to the rest of what TCP provides, such as congestion control and window scaling.
Luckily, you don't have to implement it from scratch. The UDP protocol is a good starting point, and can serve as your L3 for your new L4.
Other projects have done similar things, so it may be possible to use those instead of implementing your own. Consider QUIC or UDT. These protocols were implemented over the existing UDP protocol, and thus avoid the issues faced with deploying TCP Fast Open.
Is it a well known fact that UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is not secure, because the order of the packets sent with it may not be delivered in order, even at all. However if an UDP packet is delivered. Are the information in that packet in practical sense (99.99% and above), guaranteed to be correct?
Is a UDP packet quaranteed to be complete (not corrupted) if delivered, in practical sense (99.99% and above)?
Thanks in advance!
No for two reasons:
UDP checksums are not mandatory (with IPv4). So corrupted packets can be delivered to applications.
Internet checksums can clash much more frequently than other hashes. So even if the checksum matches, the data may be corrupted.
I am no expert but as far as I know, although there isn't any guarantee that the package reaches the destination at all in the most cases it should be correct if it reaches the destination. I think that should be the case because normally there is an error check (Frame Check Sum) on the Data Link Layer.
I have captured a TCP packet using libpcap, and I want to send this whole packet(without modifying it) to a specific port on another host(which has another sniffer listening to that port).
Is there any way I can do this?
Thanks a lot!
You didn't specify which programming language you're using and what you've tried so far.
Change the IP address field to the target IP and the TCP port field to the port you want. Don't forget to update both checksums.
If what you want is TCP forwarding, the Linux kernel already does this for you.
netcat may work in this case although I think you may have to reconstruct the header, have not tried.
How to escape hex values in netcat
The other option is to use iptables to tee the packet to the other sniffer while still catching it in you package analyzer
http://www.bjou.de/blog/2008/05/howto-copyteeclone-network-traffic-using-iptables/
Another option is using a port mirror, this goes by a few differnt names depending on the switch being used but it allows you to set a port on a a switch to be essentially a hub.
I think your best bet if you can't get netcat to work is to use iptables and you can add filters to that even.
I don't know whether you HAVE to use C or not, but even if you do, I would recommend building a prototype with Python/Scapy to begin with.
Using scapy, here are the steps:
Read the pcap file using rdpcap().
Grab the destination IP address and TCP destination port number (pkt.getlayer(IP).dst, pkt.getlayer(TCP).dport) and save it as a string in a format that you want (e.g. payload = "192.168.1.1:80").
Change the packet's destination IP address and the destination port number so that it can be received by the other host that is listening on the particular port.
Add the payload on top of the packet (pkt = pkt / payload)
Send the packet (sendp(pkt, iface='eth0'))
You will have to dissect the packet on the other host to grab the payload. Without knowing exactly what is on top of the TCP layer in the original packet, I can't give you an accurate code for this, but should be relatively straight forward.
This is all quite easy with Python/Scapy but I expect it to be much harder with C, having to manually calculate the correct offsets and checksums and things. Good luck, and I hope this helps.
Ok, I realize this situation is somewhat unusual, but I need to establish a TCP connection (the 3-way handshake) using only raw sockets (in C, in linux) -- i.e. I need to construct the IP headers and TCP headers myself. I'm writing a server (so I have to first respond to the incoming SYN packet), and for whatever reason I can't seem to get it right. Yes, I realize that a SOCK_STREAM will handle this for me, but for reasons I don't want to go into that isn't an option.
The tutorials I've found online on using raw sockets all describe how to build a SYN flooder, but this is somewhat easier than actually establishing a TCP connection, since you don't have to construct a response based on the original packet. I've gotten the SYN flooder examples working, and I can read the incoming SYN packet just fine from the raw socket, but I'm still having trouble creating a valid SYN/ACK response to an incoming SYN from the client.
So, does anyone know a good tutorial on using raw sockets that goes beyond creating a SYN flooder, or does anyone have some code that could do this (using SOCK_RAW, and not SOCK_STREAM)? I would be very grateful.
MarkR is absolutely right -- the problem is that the kernel is sending reset packets in response to the initial packet because it thinks the port is closed. The kernel is beating me to the response and the connection dies. I was using tcpdump to monitor the connection already -- I should have been more observant and noticed that there were TWO replies one of which was a reset that was screwing things up, as well as the response my program created. D'OH!
The solution that seems to work best is to use an iptables rule, as suggested by MarkR, to block the outbound packets. However, there's an easier way to do it than using the mark option, as suggested. I just match whether the reset TCP flag is set. During the course of a normal connection this is unlikely to be needed, and it doesn't really matter to my application if I block all outbound reset packets from the port being used. This effectively blocks the kernel's unwanted response, but not my own packets. If the port my program is listening on is 9999 then the iptables rule looks like this:
iptables -t filter -I OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 9999 --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
You want to implement part of a TCP stack in userspace... this is ok, some other apps do this.
One problem you will come across is that the kernel will be sending out (generally negative, unhelpful) replies to incoming packets. This is going to screw up any communication you attempt to initiate.
One way to avoid this is to use an IP address and interface that the kernel does not have its own IP stack using- which is fine but you will need to deal with link-layer stuff (specifically, arp) yourself. That would require a socket lower than IPPROTO_IP, SOCK_RAW - you need a packet socket (I think).
It may also be possible to block the kernel's responses using an iptables rule- but I rather suspect that the rules will apply to your own packets as well somehow, unless you can manage to get them treated differently (perhaps applying a netfilter "mark" to your own packets?)
Read the man pages
socket(7)
ip(7)
packet(7)
Which explain about various options and ioctls which apply to types of sockets.
Of course you'll need a tool like Wireshark to inspect what's going on. You will need several machines to test this, I recommend using vmware (or similar) to reduce the amount of hardware required.
Sorry I can't recommend a specific tutorial.
Good luck.
I realise that this is an old thread, but here's a tutorial that goes beyond the normal SYN flooders: http://www.enderunix.org/docs/en/rawipspoof/
Hope it might be of help to someone.
I can't help you out on any tutorials.
But I can give you some advice on the tools that you could use to assist in debugging.
First off, as bmdhacks has suggested, get yourself a copy of wireshark (or tcpdump - but wireshark is easier to use). Capture a good handshake. Make sure that you save this.
Capture one of your handshakes that fails. Wireshark has quite good packet parsing and error checking, so if there's a straightforward error it will probably tell you.
Next, get yourself a copy of tcpreplay. This should also include a tool called "tcprewrite".
tcprewrite will allow you to split your previously saved capture files into two - one for each side of the handshake.
You can then use tcpreplay to play back one side of the handshake so you have a consistent set of packets to play with.
Then you use wireshark (again) to check your responses.
I don't have a tutorial, but I recently used Wireshark to good effect to debug some raw sockets programming I was doing. If you capture the packets you're sending, wireshark will do a good job of showing you if they're malformed or not. It's useful for comparing to a normal connection too.
There are structures for IP and TCP headers declared in netinet/ip.h & netinet/tcp.h respectively. You may want to look at the other headers in this directory for extra macros & stuff that may be of use.
You send a packet with the SYN flag set and a random sequence number (x). You should receive a SYN+ACK from the other side. This packet will have an acknowledgement number (y) that indicates the next sequence number the other side is expecting to receive as well as another sequence number (z). You send back an ACK packet that has sequence number x+1 and ack number z+1 to complete the connection.
You also need to make sure you calculate appropriate TCP/IP checksums & fill out the remainder of the header for the packets you send. Also, don't forget about things like host & network byte order.
TCP is defined in RFC 793, available here: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc793.html
Depending on what you're trying to do it may be easier to get existing software to handle the TCP handshaking for you.
One open source IP stack is lwIP (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lwip/) which provides a full tcp/ip stack. It is very possible to get it running in user mode using either SOCK_RAW or pcap.
if you are using raw sockets, if you send using different source mac address to the actual one, linux will ignore the response packet and not send an rst.
I had a discussion with a developer earlier today re identifying TCP packets going out on a particular interface with the same payload. He told me that the probability of finding a TCP packet that has an equal payload (even if the same data is sent out several times) is very low due to the way TCP packets are constructed at system level. I was aware this may be the case due to the system's MTU settings (usually 1500 bytes) etc., but what sort of probability stats am I really looking at? Are there any specific protocols that would make it easier identifying matching payloads?
It is the protocol running over tcp that defines the uniqueness of the payload, not the tcp protocol itself.
For example, you might naively think that HTTP requests would all be identical when asking for a server's home page, but the referrer and user agent strings make the payloads different.
Similarly, if the response is dynamically generated, it may have a date header:
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:44:27 GMT
So that will render the response payloads different. However, subsequent payloads may be identical, if the content is static.
Keep in mind that the actual packets will be different because of differing sequence numbers, which are supposed to be incrementing and pseudorandom.
Chris is right. More specifically, two or three pieces of information in the packet header should be different:
the sequence number (which is
intended to be unpredictable) which
is increases with the number of
bytes transmitted and received.
the timestamp, a field containing two
timestamps (although this field is optional).
the checksum, since both the payload and header are checksummed, including the changing sequence number.
EDIT: Sorry, my original idea was ridiculous.
You got me interested so I googled a little bit and found this. If you wanted to write your own tool you would probably have to inspect each payload, the easiest way would probably be some sort of hash/checksum to check for identical payloads. Just make sure you are checking the payload, not the whole packet.
As for the statistics I will have to defer to someone with greater knowledge on the workings of TCP.
Sending the same PAYLOAD is probably fairly common (particularly if you're running some sort of network service). If you mean sending out the same tcp segment (header and all) or the whole network packet (ip and up), then the probability is substantially reduced.