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I am doing some research for school about the Kerberos protocol and its vulnerabilities, especially the Pass the Ticket attack.

Related articles are always talking about Active Directory so I was wondering if the MIT version of Kerberos was as vulnerable as Microsoft's one ? If not, why ?

Some of these articles were a little dated so maybe some attacks are no longer possible on recent versions of Windows ? Maybe there are newer vulnerabilities (I saw DCShadow attack that seemed quite new) ?

I guess some experts can pass by there and provide a good explanation.

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  • One thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft's implementation is probably targeted a lot more by attackers.
    – user
    Commented Oct 22, 2020 at 20:55

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What exactly is vulnerable in Active Directory? Without a clear baseline its impossible to compare x and y. This is an incredibly broad question and it's difficult to answer fully.

The pass-the-ticket/golden-ticket attacks are not themselves a vulnerability per se. The potential vulnerability is in the protection of the keys used to encrypt the tickets. Once you have the keys anything you do against the different parties is valid. At that point you're not attacking the protocol itself.

Active Directory protects these secrets in the directory database by encrypting them to a key protected by the machine. If you can get access to these secrets then you have full access to the database, which means you have access to the keys and can perform this attack. This is an infrastructure issue. If you don't do your own due-diligence protecting your critical infrastructure it's not reeeeeeally AD's fault. I say this because...

MIT supports multiple ways of storing directory data, and each one is equally at risk if you don't protect the infrastructure properly either. It supports LDAP and SQL and what not. Each of those has a database and protects their secrets fundamentally the same way. If you can attack that infrastructure you can get the keys and perform the attacks.

Now compare the protocol implementations. They're both RFC 4120 and they're both interoperable. They both support the same key types and extensions. This means any weaknesses of the protocol are applicable to both. Any pass-the-ticket/golden-ticket/etc. attack against AD is identical to MIT or Heimdal or whatever implementation is out there.

Where things differ is the support infrastructure. DC Sync for instance. Windows supports syncing directory databases between DCs using the MS-DRSR protocol, which when granted enough privileges allows you to request any secret you wish. This requires a critical privilege that isn't handed out freely and goes back to that protecting your infrastructure thing. MIT doesn't have a directory sync because it's not a directory. It's just an implementation of Kerberos. The LDAP directory you use to back MIT will however have a sync engine of some sort and will therefore have similar APIs and be equally attackable, if you get yourself into a privileged position.

that's the crux of this: if you can get into a privileged position you can attack the services. You could call it a vulnerability, but the meat of it is missing because you've magically crossed the security boundary without saying how. How you cross the security boundary is more appropriately the vulnerability.

All of that said, the reason Active Directory is the problem child here is because it's the most common and its makes it incredibly easy to automate equally good and bad behavior. It's the one everyone knows and it's had its share of bad press for good reasons at the time. There are some pretty obnoxious vulnerabilities like the print spooler bug or the netlogon vulnerability that pop up from time to time that take a long time to patch in the field too.

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  • Thanks a lot for taking time to awswer. I am not a troll, I was really wondering if there were differences between Kerberos implementations. I read somewhere someone talking about unsalted hashes in Microsoft version but I didn't get everything because I am not an expert and I am not an English native speaker. I have to make a presentation at school and I was just bothered by the fact that everything about Kerberos attacks were talking about Active Directory. That's why I wondered if they were also possible with MIT Kerberos, and if so with the same mechanisms.
    – cleve21
    Commented Oct 24, 2020 at 17:21
  • That's the RC4 cipher suite used by Windows. MIT also supports it. Both prefer AES though.
    – Steve
    Commented Oct 24, 2020 at 17:27

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