SSL

"Secure Sockets Layer", SSL is built into all popular web browsers and web servers. It allows encrypted web surfing, and is almost always used in e-commerce when users enter their credit card information.

This site for Apache SSL describes this: http://www.modssl.org/

PGP and S/MIME

E-mail can be sniffed in many alternative ways. It passes through corporate firewalls, which may monitor the traffic. It often gets logged and saved for extended periods of time. It may get accidentally misdirected, and end up in somebody else's mailbox. The best way to keep such e-mail secret is to encrypt it. The two common ways of doing this are with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and S/MIME (Secure MIME). PGP can be purchased as an add-on to many products. S/MIME is built into e-mail programs by Netscape and Microsoft.

ssh

"Secure Shell", ssh has become the de facto standard for logging into UNIX machines from the Internet. You should immediately replace telnet with this service. Numerous other protocols can be tunneled through ssh connections (i.e. file copy). The product was originally developed by a Finish company http://www.ssh.fi/ but many open-source/freeware implementations also exist.

VPNs (Virtual Private Networks)

VPNs provide encrypted traffic across the Internet. However, if a hacker compromises the end-nodes of a VPN connection, they can still sniff the traffic. A typical scenario is an end-user who surfs the Internet normally and gets compromised with a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that contains a sniffing plug-in. When the user establishes the VPN connection, the sniffing program is able to see not only the encrypted traffic that can be seen on the Internet, but also the unencrypted traffic before it gets sent through the stack to the VPN.

SMB/CIFS

In the Windows/SAMBA environment, make sure that you have the older LanManager authentication turned off. This requires SAMBA v2 or later, WinNT SP3 or later, and so on.

Kerberos v5

Both Windows 2000 and UNIX provide support for Kerberos authentication. This is one of the strongest generic mechanisms available. ftp://aeneas.mit.edu/pub/kerberos/doc/KERBEROS.FAQ

smart cards

There are numerous smart card implementations around providing one-time passwords. These are often used when connecting remotely, either dial-in or VPN across the Internet.

Stanford SRP (Secure Remote Password)

Enhancements to Telnet and FTP for UNIX and Windows. http://srp.stanford.edu/srp/

While this solution is extremely effective in practice (and should be strongly considered), it shouldn't be relied upon as a complete defense against sniffing. A switch still creates a "broadcast domain", providing an attacker the ability to spoof ARP packets.

The easiest such exploit is the "router redirection". ARP queries contain the correct IP-to-MAC mapping for the sender. In order to reduce ARP traffic, most machines will cache this information that they read from the query broadcasts. Therefore, a malicious attacker can redirect nearby machines to forward traffic through it by sending out regular ARP packets containing the router's IP address mapped to its own MAC address. All the machines on the local wire will believe the hacker is the router, and therefore pass their traffic through him/her.

A similar attack would be to DoS a target victim and force it off the network, then begin using its IP address. If a hacker does this carefully, s/he can inherit connections already established without dropping them. Windows machines are even so polite that when they come onto the network and see someone else using their address, they will kindly shut down their own TCP/IP stacks and allow this to continue. SMB (the Windows file sharing protocol) is also kind enough to allow predictable identifiers, allowing cr/hackers to predict enough information to keep the connection going.

Most intrusion detection systems and even network management tools like the Expert Sniffer(tm) will detect these shenanigans. For example, putting the BlackICE IDS on all the Windows end-nodes or hooked to a normal port (to receive broadcasts) will alert the security admin that such things are taking place (but, will generate false positives when DHCP reassigns addresses. Sigh.)

Most Ethernet adapters allow the MAC address to be manually configured. Thus a hacker can spoof MAC addresses by reassigning the address on the adapter, or by bypassing the built-in stack and hand-crafting frames. The hacker must maintain a a constant stream of outgoing frames in order to convince the auto-learning switch that they are the legitimate owner of the MAC address.

Many (most??) switches allow MAC addresses to be configured statically in order to prevent this sort of thing. While it may be a difficult management burden to do this for all end-nodes, it may prove useful for the router, restricting the hacker to wiretapping individual end-nodes instead of everyone all at once.

Some switches can be kicked out of "bridging" mode into "repeating" mode where all frames are broadcast on all ports all the time. This is done by overflowing the address tables with lots of false MAC addresses. This can be done with a simple traffic generation phase, or by sending a continual stream of random garbage through the switch.

The real answer is "yes", there are some older adapters that do not support promiscuos mode. In particular, the original IBM Token Ring adapters (TROPIC chipset) were not able to run in promiscuous mode. There are also a few Ethernet where promiscuous mode is broken, either in the hardware or in the driver. Actually, there are far more adapters who simply lack the functionality in the driver in order to turn on promiscuous mode, meaning all programs that attempt to put them into promiscuous mode will fail even though the hardware supports the mode in theory. If you really must have one, then call technical support for a sniffing product vendor (such as NAI) and ask them which cards they DON'T support. For Windows, you might check with Microsoft support to see which cards do not support NetMon (I remember there are a few, but I can't find the documentation for it).

Note that in the Intel/Microsoft "PC99" guidelines, promiscuous mode is a "required" feature.

If this is a concern, it will be cheaper in the long run simply to upgrade to switching hubs, which basically does the same thing. An Ethernet switch moves the "address match" upstream, so that the switch does it rather than the adapter.

Finally, it should be noted that most new networks are switched in some fashion. Even though hackers cannot sniff an entire Ethernet segment, they still install sniffers on machines in order to see the incoming/outgoing traffic. A non-promiscuous adapter won't help defend against this.

A stand-alone packet sniffer doesn't transmit any packets, but when installed non-standalone on a normal computer, the sniffing program will often generate traffic. For example, it might send out DNS reverse lookups in order to find names associated with IP addresses.

Non-standalone packet sniffers are indeed what you want to detect. When crackers/hackers invade machines, they often install sniffing programs. You want to be able to detect this happening.

General Overview of Detection Methods

ping method

Most "packet sniffers" run on normal machines with a normal TCP/IP stack. This means that if you send a request to these machines, they will respond. The trick is to send a request to IP address of the machine, but not to its Ethernet adapter.

To illustrate:

1. The machine suspected of running the packet sniffer has an IP address 10.0.0.1, and an Ethernet address of 00-40-05-A4-79-32.
2. You are on the same Ethernet segment as the suspect (remember, the Ethernet is used only to communicate locally on a segment, not remotely across the Internet).
3. You change the MAC address slightly, such as 00-40-05-A4-79-33.
4. You transmit an "ICMP Echo Request" (ping) with the IP address and this new MAC address.
5. Remember that NOBODY should see this packet, because as the frame goes down the wire, each Ethernet adapter matches the MAC address with their own MAC address. If none matches, then they ignore the frame.
6. If you see the response, then the suspect wasn't running this "MAC address filter" on the card, and is hence sniffing on the wire.

There are ways defending against this. Now that this technique is widely publicized, newer hackers will enabled a virtual MAC address filter in their code. Many machines (notably Windows) have MAC filtering in drivers. (There is a hack for Windows: most drivers just check the first byte, so a MAC address of FF-00-00-00-00-00 looks like FF-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF (the broadcast address which all adapters accept). However, some adapters implement multicast in such as way that this address will match as a multicast, which is any address whose first byte is an odd number. Thus, this can result in false positives).

This technique will usually work on switched/bridged Ethernets. When switches see an unknown MAC address for the first time, they will "flood" the frame to all segments.

ping method, part 2

The ping method can be enhanced in a number of ways:

1. Any protocol that generates a response can be used, such as a TCP connection request or a UDP protocol such as port 7 (echo).
2. Any protocol that might generate an error on the target machine might be used. For example, bad IP header values might be used to generate an ICMP error.
3. Sometimes a broadcast address (either a "local broadcast" like 255.255.255.255 or a "directed broadcast" like 10.0.0.255) needs to be used in order to bypass software IP address filtering. This then encounters another problem in that many machines do not respond to broadcast requests (responses to broadcasts causes network problems, such as the 'smurf' hack).

ARP method

The ARP method is similar to the ping method, but an ARP packet is used instead. An explanation (in Spanish) is given at http://www.apostols.org/projectz/neped/ which includes a program to do this detection.

The simplest ARP method transmits an ARP to a non-broadcast address. If a machine responds to such an ARP of its IP address, then it must be in promiscuous mode.

A variation of this technique takes advantage of the fact that machines "cache" ARPs. Each ARP contains the complete information of both the sender as well as the desired target information. In other words, when I send out a single ARP to the broadcast address, I include my own IP-to-Ethernet address mapping. Everyone else on the wire remembers this information for the next few minutes. Therefore, you could do something like sending out a non-broadcast ARP, then a broadcast ping. Anybody who responds to your ping without ARPing you could only have gotten the MAC address from a sniffed ARP frame. (To make double-sure, use a different source MAC address in the ping).

DNS method

Many sniffing programs do automatic reverse-DNS lookups on the IP addresses they see. Therefore, a promiscuous mode can be detected by watching for the DNS traffic that it generates.

This method can detect dual-homed machines and can work remotely. You need to monitor incoming inverse-DNS lookups on the DNS server in your organization. Simply do a ping sweep throughout the company against machines that are known not to exist. Anybody doing reverse DNS lookups on those addresses are attempting to lookup the IP addresses seen in ARP packets, which only sniffing programs do.

This same technique works locally. Configure the detector in promiscuous mode itself, then send out IP datagrams to bad addresses and watch for the DNS lookups.

One interesting issue with this technique is that hacker-based sniffing programs tend to resolve IP addresses as soon as they are found, whereas commercial programs tend to delay resolution until the point where the packet sniffer user views the protocol decodes.

source-route method

Another technique involves configuring the source-route information inside the IP header. This can be used to detect packet sniffers on other, nearby segments.

1. Create a ping packet, but put a loose-source route to force it by another machine on the same segment. This machine should have routing disabled, so that it will not in fact forward it to the target.
2. If you get a response, then it is likely the target sniffed the packet off the wire.
3. In the response, doublecheck the TTL field to find out if it' came back due to sniffing (rather than being routed correctly)

Details:

In loose source-routing, an option is added to the IP header. Routers will ignore the destination IP address and instead forward to the next IP address in the source-route option. This means when you send the packet, you can say "please send packet to Bob, but route it through Anne first".

In this scenario, both "Anne" and "Bob" are on the segment. Anne does not route, and therefore will drop the packet when received. Therefore, "Bob" will only respond if he has sniffed the packet from the wire.

On the off chance that Anne does indeed route (in which case Bob will respond), then the TTL field can be used to verify that Bob responded from routing through Anne, or answering directly.

The decoy method

Whereas the ping and ARP methods only work on the local network, the decoy method works everywhere.

Since so many protocols allow "plain text" passwords, and hackers run sifters looking for those passwords, the decoy method simply satisfies that need. It consists simply of setting up a client and a serve on either side of the network, which the client runs a script to logon to the server using Telnet, POP, IMAP, or some other plain-text protocol. The server is configured with special accounts that have no real rights, or the server is completely virtual (in which case, the accounts don't really exist).

Once a hacker sifts the usernames/passwords from the wire, he/she will then attempt to log on using this information. Standard intrusion detection systems or audit trails can be configured to log this occurance, alerting the fact that a sniffing hacker has found the traffic and attempted to use the information.

http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~dac/Prog_RAID98/Full_Papers/sniffer_detector.html/index.htm

host method

When hackers break into your systems, they will often leave behind wiretap programs running in the background in order to sniff passwords and user accounts off the wire. These are often imbedded (as a trojan) in other programs, so the only way to find if something like this is running is to query the interfaces to see if they are running in promiscuous mode.

The most technique is to run the program "ifconfig -a". On my computer (Solaris 2.6) the output looks like:

	# ifconfig -a
	lo0: flags=849<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 8232
			inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000
	hme0: flags=863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,PROMISC,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
			inet 192.0.2.99 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.0.2.255
			ether 8:0:20:9c:a2:98   
	

Of course, the first thing a hacker will do is replace the 'ifconfig' program to hide this. There are other utilities you can download from the net that will query the hardware directly in order to discover this information, or you could run the 'ifconfig' program directly from a CD-ROM distribution.

latency method

This is a more evil method. On one hand, it can significantly degrade network performance. On the other hand, it can 'blind' packet sniffers by sending too much traffic.

This method functions by sending huge quantities of network traffic on the wire. This has no effect on non-promiscuous machines, but has a huge effect on sniffing machines, especially those parsing application layer protocols for passwords. Simply ping the machine before the load and during the load and testing the difference in response time can indicate if the machine is under load.

One problem with this technique is that packets can be delayed simply because of the load on the wire, which may case timeouts and therefore false positives. On the other hand, many sniffing programs are "user mode" whereas pings are responded to in "kernel mode", and are therefore independent of CPU load on a machine, thereby causing false negatives.

TDR (Time-Domain Reflectometers)

A TDR is basically RADAR for the wire. It sends a pulse down the wire, then graphs the reflections that come back. An expert can look at the graph of the response and figure out if any devices are attached to the wire that shouldn't be. They also roughly tell where, in terms of distance along the wire, the tap is located.

This can detect hardware packet sniffers that might be attached to the wire, but which are completely silent otherwise.

TDRs used to be used a lot in the old days of coax Ethernet in order to detect vampire taps, but these days with star topologies, they are used very rarely.

There also exist OTDR equipment, but this is really only for the truely paranoid.

hub lights

You can manually check hub-lights to see if there are any connections you don't expect. It helps to have labeled cables to figure out where (physically) a packet sniffer might be located.

SNMP monitoring

Smart hubs with SNMP management can provide automated monitroning of Ethernet (and other) hubs. Some management consoles will even let you log connections/disconnections to all your ports. If you've configured the system with the information where all the cables terminate, you can sometimes track down where a packet sniffer might be hiding.

Tools to detect packet sniffers

AntiSniff

http://www.l0pht.com/antisniff/

The most comprehensive sniffer-detection tool.

CPM (Check Promiscuous Mode)

ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/cpm/

A tool from Carnegie-Mellon that checks to see if promiscuous mode is enabled on a UNIX machine.

neped

http://www.apostols.org/projectz/neped/

A tool from The Apostols that detects packet sniffers running on the local segment.

sentinel

http://www.packetfactory.net/Projects/sentinel/

Other Sniffing Detection Resources

http://www.securiteam.com/unixfocus/Detecting_sniffers_on_your_network.html