Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Uncommon trick to bypass windows firewall

When I was about to write post I remembered a scene from the movie Monty Python. It's about a black knight that blocks a bridge (his main purpose) saying the following to Arthur, a guy who insisted on crossing the bridge in safety: "None shall pass!". But Arthur kept on insisting, so the black night said: "Then you shall die.".

A firewall is supposed to stop all applications that don't have a good reason to get privileged access to computers or networks. If your app could "bypass" it, so could malicious applications. Firewall plays the same role as the black night, i.e. prevent anything suspicious from going through the bridge.

You can configure firewalls to let particular connections go through the checks, but sometimes you need physical access to the equipment running the firewall to do that.  Don't you have access to the equipment running the firewall? If so, you need to bypass it.

Are you willing to change rules via RegEdit to allow a specific service to run? I have some bad news to you. Your antivirus can detect this trick, because it's a common approach used by malwares.
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile
  • SYSTEM\ControlSet%03d\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile\AuthorizedApplications\List

Before you say "I can try to hook it" or "I can execute a function like execl(), system() with the argument: 
  • netsh advfirewall set currentprofile state off
What if I tell you that you can use Windows API to simulate a keystroke so as to bypass firewall checks?

Windows has the function SendInput() to simulate a keystroke. This function accepts as argument an array of INPUT structures. The INPUT structures can be either a mouse or a keyboard event. The keyboard event structure has a member called wVk which can be any key on the keyboard.

SendInput() played an important role when writing the code for bypassing Windows firewall. How does it work? 

Firstly, it finds a window with title 'Windows Security Alert' using the function GetWindowText(). Secondly, it calls SendInput() with TAB and ENTER keys to choose button 'allow access'. As simple as that

Take a look at the following video:



Take a look at my code that bypasses Windows firewall:
https://github.com/CoolerVoid/X_files/blob/master/docs/PoCs/bypass_firewall_windows.cpp 

This is a very cool trick. No more words friends. Thank you for reading this!


cheers !

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