A fairy long title, but it describes exactly what this post is about. Once again a post about a Microsoft product and the way it works (or rather doesn't work) with your average Internet standard.
This week I was busy with RADIUS, 802.1x, PKI and the protection of websites with SSL encryption. For the implementation of 802.1x, I needed a PKI environment, so I used the Microsoft Certificate Services for that purpose. Along the way, I needed an SSL certificate for an internal website, but this particular website needed to work properly based on different FQDN's and or IP addresses without throwing warining or errors regarding the SSL connection.
The way to do this is to add Subject Alternative Names (SAN) to the certificate. This enables you to access the website in different ways, e.g.;
- Access a webmail host from the internet based on its official FQDN (https://webmail.somedomain.com)
- Access the same webmail host from the inside of the corporate lan based on its internal name (https://webmail.acme.local)
- And access the host from legacy DNS-unaware software on its IP address (https://192.168.1.254)
Now that I have a SRX running at home and a syslog server powered by Splunk (free version) it's time to be able to understand the logging. The raw logging is pretty unreadable for the average Joe. Thankfully, Splunk can be used to make more sense of it.
Downside is that I haven't found any add-ons / plugins etc. for Splunk to analyze the logging of a Juniper SRX firewall. There is a post on the Splunk forum which offers two regular expression which can be used to define the RT_FLOW fields.
This post contains several useful Junos SRX commands for the CLI. Mainly for myself, because I don't use those command regularly....
This post will be updated over time... Here it goes:
View session information:
root@srx100> show security flow session summary
Clear sessions through the firewall:
root@srx100> clear security flow session all
Switch to other node in a cluster via CLI (over the HA-link):
root@srx100> request routing-engine login node 1
By default, the J-Web interface (GUI for the Juniper SRX firewalls) has SSL enabled. Like most devices with SSL out-of-the-box, the protection is based on a self-signed certificate. Self-signed certificates are easy (they come basically out-of-the-box), but they tend to nag you every time you connect to the GUI. So, it's time to install a proper certificate.
In this case, I use the XCA (1) software to create a new certificate. This certificate is signed by my own root CA, which I installed on all of my devices and Operating Systems. Basically, I trust myself.....
According to the Juniper support pages on SSL certificate usage, I found out that the certificates are to be in the PEM format. No problem for XCA.
The Fritzbox 7340 is the only real available VDSL modem/router in the Netherlands. Too bad, since it has some bugs (but what piece of software hasn't???). Fortunately, the router works well, just as long as you use it as the only networking device in your (small) network.
In the last couple of days I've been busy to add the Juniper SRX100 branch firewall to my local home network. The idea was the following:
- The Fritzbox (FB) will remain the Internet router
- My web/mail/ssh server is placed behind the SRX100
- All the individual portforward rules in the Fritzbox are directed to the SRX100 by selecting the 'Exposed Host' in the FB.
Juniper started to migrate their firewalls from Netscreen to the Junos environment 'a couple of' months back. The advantage is that there's a universal OS for routers, switches and firewalls. Just like Cisco IOS. The disadvantage is that the Junos OS is being adapted for the firewalls. So the foundations are there, but there are still lots of features missing and bugs are also still abundant.
The bugs are thankfully mostly related to the WebGUI. On the commandlinethe bugs are in the same league as the Cisco, Checkpoint and every other vendor bugs. No piece of software is perfect.
For testing and development purposes I run a Cisco Secure ACS 5.x in a virtual machine at home. In this environment I also run an Apple Directory Service. I'll be using this setup to test several 802.1x and RADIUS authentication schemes.
To get things going I needed to connect to the ACS to my LDAP Directory. The Apple Directory Service is a bit different from the regular LDAP implementations. They seem to add the 'apple' reference in a lot of attribute values. Thankfully the ACS has a very versatile configuration interface.
Apple references in attribute valuesNormally, the group definition would be 'group' instead of 'apple-group'. So the configuration of the ACS should reflect these variations to the standard.
During the clean-up of my personal data on my Mac's, I found several PGP encrypted containers, and encrypted files. To see what was stored in them, I needed to install PGP (again).
After installing the software I dug up my keyrings and everything worked fine, until I tried to encrypt an e-mail. In the old days you had a button for encrypting the body of an e-mail message, but today things have changed. PGP is using some sort of (local) proxy to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify e-mail messages. BUT there's also the possibility to do this with text on the clipboard, or text you selected with your mouse/keyboard.
This is where I ran into some missing functionality; Normally the PGP actions are visible under the 'right-mouse' click -> Services, but no PGP actions available. Further investigation showed that no PGP actions were available on (plain) text in editors. PGP actions on entire files were no problem.
I'm currently busy with several 802.1x implementations in corporate networks, and in one of those environment I get the strangest behavior in regards to the authentication process.
In this particular case I use a Microsoft 2008 Active Directory. Mandatory for distributing the wired network adapter settings in regards to 802.1x. The clients are a mix of Windows XP (SP1 and SP3) clients and some newer and/or exotic operating systems. The authentication mechanism of choice is EAP-TLS with dynamic VLAN assignment. The RADIUS server used is the Cisco Secure ACS v5.x appliance.
During the authentication process of the XP SP3 PC's I saw that the first authentication attempt was made with the PEAP mechanism. Since PEAP isn't allowed, the authentication mechanism failed. About a minute and twenty seconds later the PC started another dot1x authentication sequence. This time using EAP-TLS, and the PC got access to the network.
Today we ran into a feature of the Machine Authentication Restrictions (MAR) option in the Cisco Secure ACS Radius server. It seems that when you're using the ACS for 802.1x authentication, you have the option of demanding that the authenticating users can only be authenticated when the computer is already authenticated. This way, you make sure that no user can access the network without a legitimate PC.
;)