Sguil: detecting ICMP tunnels

Posted on Aug 25, 2006

My earlier post about detecting ICMP anomolies was based on dry theory combined with experimenting with the ping command. The last couple of days I have been playing with real ICMP tunnels, to see how detection of those would work. This was easier said than done. Sure, running PingTunnel or itun between two hosts in my LAN worked fine. However, being an inline guy, i have Sancp looking at traffic passing my firewall only. And getting the ICMP tunnels to pass the firewall was the real trick. I won’t bore you with that now, because i intend to look at counter measures later, so i’ll handle that then. For now I will just assume that these ping tunnels will not be blocked by the firewall.

The query is largely the same as in my earlier post about detecting ICMP anomolies. However, i made one addition. Sancp also stores session duration information. In other words, how long did a session last. I figured that ICMP tunnels may have longer than average duractions, since they are likely to be used for hiding interactive sessions like ssh, irc or msn. One should remember however, that a continues ping command that (accidently) runs for a long period of time will also have a long duration.

Sguil Sensor Report Showing an ICMP Report

Five results. Three of which are (partly) ICMP tunnel traffic. Spotting them is easy. They all have the following properties:

  1. Non-standard average packet size. E.g. 81.81 bytes for the first connection is non-standard.
  2. Number of bytes in both directions are unequal.
  3. Average packet size in both directions is unequal.

The number of bytes transfered seems to be not a really good indicator in itself. The second result transfered 29 MB, the biggest number from these results, but was no tunnel. It was a ‘ping -f 192.168.0.102’ for a few minutes. The same goes for the duration. Sure the first tunnel has by far the longest duration, but if i keep a ping session running for a week it won’t misteriously turn into a tunnel ;-)

Still, i think it is useful to have the information around because once you suspect a tunnel exists, volume and duration might be further indicators something is wrong.

This is the Sguil report:

TOPTENICMP||Top 10 ICMP LAN->WAN: Top 10 ICMP users in the LAN talking to the WAN, with source and destination, volume and average packet size, sorted by packet size (fields: source ip, dest ip, from source MB, from source packet size, from dest MB, from dest packet size, total duration, average duration)||query||select INET_NTOA(src_ip), INET_NTOA(dst_ip), sum(src_bytes)/1048576 as from_src_bytes, sum(src_bytes)/sum(src_pkts) as from_src_avg_pktsize, sum(dst_bytes)/1048576 as from_dst_bytes, sum(dst_bytes)/sum(dst_pkts) as from_dst_avg_pktsize, SUM(duration) as my_total_duration, SUM(duration)/COUNT(*) as my_avg_duration FROM sancp IGNORE INDEX (p_key) INNER JOIN sensor ON sancp.sid=sensor.sid WHERE start_time > %%STARTTIME%% AND end_time < %%ENDTIME%% AND %%SENSORS%% AND ip_proto = 1 AND ((src_ip between INET_ATON(“192.168.0.0”) and INET_ATON(“192.168.255.255”)) or (src_ip between INET_ATON(“10.0.0.0”) and INET_ATON(“10.255.255.255”)) or (src_ip between INET_ATON(“172.16.0.0”) and INET_ATON(“172.31.255.255”))) and ((dst_ip not between INET_ATON(“192.168.0.0”) and INET_ATON(“192.168.255.255”)) and (dst_ip not between INET_ATON(“10.0.0.0”) and INET_ATON(“10.255.255.255”)) and (dst_ip not between INET_ATON(“172.16.0.0”) and INET_ATON(“172.31.255.255”))) GROUP BY src_ip,dst_ip ORDER BY from_src_avg_pktsize DESC,from_src_bytes DESC LIMIT 10||8||

I also added ‘IGNORE INDEX (p_key)’. I saw default queries in Sguil use that, and it seems to improve performance. On my data these queries might return results in a few seconds, one user working with a bigger set of data reported it running an hour and a half… oops! Let’s see if this works.

A logical next step will be to create a query that actually compares the to_src and to_dst values average packet sizes and total transfered volume. I hope to get to that in a few days.

Btw, if you find this stuff interesting, i suggest you take a look at Extrusion Detection by Richard Bejtlich.