March 22, 2019

nullprogram.com/blog/2019/03/22/

This article was discussed on Hacker News, on reddit (also), and featured in BSD Now 294.

I’m a big fan of tarpits: a network service that intentionally inserts delays in its protocol, slowing down clients by forcing them to wait. This arrests the speed at which a bad actor can attack or probe the host system, and it ties up some of the attacker’s resources that might otherwise be spent attacking another host. When done well, a tarpit imposes more cost on the attacker than the defender.

The Internet is a very hostile place, and anyone who’s ever stood up an Internet-facing IPv4 host has witnessed the immediate and continuous attacks against their server. I’ve maintained such a server for nearly six years now, and more than 99% of my incoming traffic has ill intent. One part of my defenses has been tarpits in various forms. The latest addition is an SSH tarpit I wrote a couple of months ago:

Endlessh: an SSH tarpit

This program opens a socket and pretends to be an SSH server. However, it actually just ties up SSH clients with false promises indefinitely — or at least until the client eventually gives up. After cloning the repository, here’s how you can try it out for yourself (default port 2222):

$ make $ ./endlessh & $ ssh -p2222 localhost

Your SSH client will hang there and wait for at least several days before finally giving up. Like a mammoth in the La Brea Tar Pits, it got itself stuck and can’t get itself out. As I write, my Internet-facing SSH tarpit currently has 27 clients trapped in it. A few of these have been connected for weeks. In one particular spike it had 1,378 clients trapped at once, lasting about 20 hours.

My Internet-facing Endlessh server listens on port 22, which is the standard SSH port. I long ago moved my real SSH server off to another port where it sees a whole lot less SSH traffic — essentially none. This makes the logs a whole lot more manageable. And (hopefully) Endlessh convinces attackers not to look around for an SSH server on another port.

How does it work? Endlessh exploits a little paragraph in RFC 4253, the SSH protocol specification. Immediately after the TCP connection is established, and before negotiating the cryptography, both ends send an identification string:

SSH-protoversion-softwareversion SP comments CR LF

The RFC also notes:

The server MAY send other lines of data before sending the version string.

There is no limit on the number of lines, just that these lines must not begin with “SSH-“ since that would be ambiguous with the identification string, and lines must not be longer than 255 characters including CRLF. So Endlessh sends and endless stream of randomly-generated “other lines of data” without ever intending to send a version string. By default it waits 10 seconds between each line. This slows down the protocol, but prevents it from actually timing out.

This means Endlessh need not know anything about cryptography or the vast majority of the SSH protocol. It’s dead simple.

Implementation strategies

Ideally the tarpit’s resource footprint should be as small as possible. It’s just a security tool, and the server does have an actual purpose that doesn’t include being a tarpit. It should tie up the attacker’s resources, not the server’s, and should generally be unnoticeable. (Take note all those who write the awful “security” products I have to tolerate at my day job.)

Even when many clients have been trapped, Endlessh spends more than 99.999% of its time waiting around, doing nothing. It wouldn’t even be accurate to call it I/O-bound. If anything, it’s timer-bound, waiting around before sending off the next line of data. The most precious resource to conserve is memory.

Processes

The most straightforward way to implement something like Endlessh is a fork server: accept a connection, fork, and the child simply alternates between sleep(3) and write(2) :

for (;;) { ssize_t r ; char line [ 256 ]; sleep ( DELAY ); generate_line ( line ); r = write ( fd , line , strlen ( line )); if ( r == - 1 && errno != EINTR ) { exit ( 0 ); } }

A process per connection is a lot of overhead when connections are expected to be up hours or even weeks at a time. An attacker who knows about this could exhaust the server’s resources with little effort by opening up lots of connections.

Threads

A better option is, instead of processes, to create a thread per connection. On Linux this is practically the same thing, but it’s still better. However, you still have to allocate a stack for the thread and the kernel will have to spend some resources managing the thread.

Poll

For Endlessh I went for an even more lightweight version: a single-threaded poll(2) server, analogous to stackless green threads. The overhead per connection is about as low as it gets.

Clients that are being delayed are not registered in poll(2) . Their only overhead is the socket object in the kernel, and another 78 bytes to track them in Endlessh. Most of those bytes are used only for accurate logging. Only those clients that are overdue for a new line are registered for poll(2) .

When clients are waiting, but no clients are overdue, poll(2) is essentially used in place of sleep(3) . Though since it still needs to manage the accept server socket, it (almost) never actually waits on nothing.

There’s an option to limit the total number of client connections so that it doesn’t get out of hand. In this case it will stop polling the accept socket until a client disconnects. I probably shouldn’t have bothered with this option and instead relied on ulimit , a feature already provided by the operating system.

I could have used epoll (Linux) or kqueue (BSD), which would be much more efficient than poll(2) . The problem with poll(2) is that it’s constantly registering and unregistering Endlessh on each of the overdue sockets each time around the main loop. This is by far the most CPU-intensive part of Endlessh, and it’s all inflicted on the kernel. Most of the time, even with thousands of clients trapped in the tarpit, only a small number of them at polled at once, so I opted for better portability instead.

One consequence of not polling connections that are waiting is that disconnections aren’t noticed in a timely fashion. This makes the logs less accurate than I like, but otherwise it’s pretty harmless. Unforunately even if I wanted to fix this, the poll(2) interface isn’t quite equipped for it anyway.

Raw sockets

With a poll(2) server, the biggest overhead remaining is in the kernel, where it allocates send and receive buffers for each client and manages the proper TCP state. The next step to reducing this overhead is Endlessh opening a raw socket and speaking TCP itself, bypassing most of the operating system’s TCP/IP stack.

Much of the TCP connection state doesn’t matter to Endlessh and doesn’t need to be tracked. For example, it doesn’t care about any data sent by the client, so no receive buffer is needed, and any data that arrives could be dropped on the floor.

Even more, raw sockets would allow for some even nastier tarpit tricks. Despite the long delays between data lines, the kernel itself responds very quickly on the TCP layer and below. ACKs are sent back quickly and so on. An astute attacker could detect that the delay is artificial, imposed above the TCP layer by an application.

If Endlessh worked at the TCP layer, it could tarpit the TCP protocol itself. It could introduce artificial “noise” to the connection that requires packet retransmissions, delay ACKs, etc. It would look a lot more like network problems than a tarpit.

I haven’t taken Endlessh this far, nor do I plan to do so. At the moment attackers either have a hard timeout, so this wouldn’t matter, or they’re pretty dumb and Endlessh already works well enough.

asyncio and other tarpits

Since writing Endless I’ve learned about Python’s asycio , and it’s actually a near perfect fit for this problem. I should have just used it in the first place. The hard part is already implemented within asyncio , and the problem isn’t CPU-bound, so being written in Python doesn’t matter.

Here’s a simplified (no logging, no configuration, etc.) version of Endlessh implemented in about 20 lines of Python 3.7:

import asyncio import random async def handler ( _reader , writer ): try : while True : await asyncio . sleep ( 10 ) writer . write ( b'%x \r

' % random . randint ( 0 , 2 ** 32 )) await writer . drain () except ConnectionResetError : pass async def main (): server = await asyncio . start_server ( handler , '0.0.0.0' , 2222 ) async with server : await server . serve_forever () asyncio . run ( main ())

Since Python coroutines are stackless, the per-connection memory overhead is comparable to the C version. So it seems asycio is perfectly suited for writing tarpits! Here’s an HTTP tarpit to trip up attackers trying to exploit HTTP servers. It slowly sends a random, endless HTTP header:

import asyncio import random async def handler ( _reader , writer ): writer . write ( b'HTTP/1.1 200 OK \r

' ) try : while True : await asyncio . sleep ( 5 ) header = random . randint ( 0 , 2 ** 32 ) value = random . randint ( 0 , 2 ** 32 ) writer . write ( b'X-%x: %x \r

' % ( header , value )) await writer . drain () except ConnectionResetError : pass async def main (): server = await asyncio . start_server ( handler , '0.0.0.0' , 8080 ) async with server : await server . serve_forever () asyncio . run ( main ())

Try it out for yourself. Firefox and Chrome will spin on that server for hours before giving up. I have yet to see curl actually timeout on its own in the default settings ( --max-time / -m does work correctly, though).

Parting exercise for the reader: Using the examples above as a starting point, implement an SMTP tarpit using asyncio. Bonus points for using TLS connections and testing it against real spammers.