## Tuesday, June 24, 2014

### H.323 Registration Weaknesses: Part 1

Voice-over-IP VoIP is a rather obscure niche. There are essentially two main standards: SIP and H.323. While the former may be more well-known by the Internet crowd, H.323 is still the dominant standard today for large deployments, due to the telecom heritage of ITU-T standards.

Some time ago, we found a vulnerability in the endpoint registration phase of several Avaya products. In fact, we found two vulnerabilities: one in the "default" autentication method for Avaya phones, and another one in the "secure" method. This post describes the first one. I will describe the second, more interesting, flaw in the next post.

The default authentication mode for Avaya's phones was based on the ISO/IEC 9798-2 standard. This is essentially a challenge-response protocol, wherein the user must prove to the gateway he knows the password by encrypting a gateway-chosen secret with a key derived from it. When a client wants to authenticate itself to a gateway, both knowing a shared secret (e.g., a password), the following interaction happens between the user (U) and the gatekeeper (G):

• gatekeeperRequest ($$U \rightarrow G$$): this message contains the authenticationCapability field set to pwdSymEnc, and the algorithmOIDs field set to the OID 1.3.14.3.2.6, which is defined to be DES in CTS mode.
• gatekeeperConfirm ($$G \rightarrow U$$): $$G$$ sends back to $$U$$ a ClearToken containing the challenge. This challenge consists of a timestamp, a random integer, and generalID, an identifier of the gateway.
• registrationRequest $$U \rightarrow G$$: $$U$$ sends the ClearToken back to $$G$$, encrypted using the user's key $$K_{p}$$ using the aforementioned DES-ECB-CTS. The key derivation is virtually nonexistent, and resembles the weak Norton Diskreet function breakable with Copacobana:

•  unsigned char deskey[8] = {0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0};
for(i=0; i < pwlen; ++i)
deskey[i%8] ^= 2*password[i];  
• registrationConfirm/registrationRejected $$G \rightarrow U$$: Depending on whether the authentication succeeded, the gateway will send back one of these messages to the user.
So what is the problem here? The protocol employed for the authentication, ISO/IEC 9798-2 (Mechanism 2), seems to be sound, according to its requirements. This protocol, however, does not do anything to prevent offline attacks that retrieve the shared key; since this key is derived from a (potentialy weak) password, bruteforce will work quite effectively.

One might argue that this is not really a weakness, and that a strong password should be able to keep attackers at bay. Unfortunately, due to the poor cipher choice (56-bit DES in ECB-CTS mode), poor key derivation function, and known plaintext (generalID), one is able to bruteforce any password, regardless of its strength.

Consider the following gatekeeperRequest sample packet:

0000   45 00 01 00 c0 17 24 09 12 02 6a df 14 00 44 00  E.....\$...j...D.
0010   45 00 46 00 49 00 4e 00 49 00 54 00 59 00 2d 00  E.F.I.N.I.T.Y.-.
0020   47 00 4b                                         G.K

We have known plaintext there, namely the UTF-16 string "DEFINITY-GK". Given the encrypted registrationRequest packet,

0000   3d 7a d2 d5 98 9a 04 1c 07 b0 b2 c0 ca 9b fb cb  =z..............
0010   c6 ab 9c 5a 74 e5 0f 4d 80 3e bf fe bb bb d9 ca  ...Zt..M.>......
0020   1d 33 ef                                         .3.

we can obviously bruteforce the DES key out of a network capture. In this example, the password exployed was "3002".

DES bruteforcing is a very well studied problem, and specialized hardware can break any key quickly and at relatively low cost. With a weak key derivation as the above, it becomes much easier. Consider, for example, a long password that only uses the alphabet A-Z. This highly restricts the bit pattern to 010XXXXX, or 5 useful bits per byte, or $$2^{40}$$ distinct keys, already smaller a keyspace than bruteforcing a 9-character password ($$\approx 2^{42}$$ possibilities).

One can go even further, by noticing that similar products use similar generalID strings. This allows for precomputing to break those: using time-memory tradeoff techniques, an attacker can perform a single large precomputation that allows for  much faster key recovery. Martin Hellman showed that a precomputed table of $$2^{38}$$ values allows for a recovery of the key in about $$2^{38}$$ iterations, following a $$2^{56}$$-iteration table generation procedure. The state of the art today is rainbow tables, which provide a significant, albeit non-asymptotic, speedup over Hellman's method.

This is it for the old default authentication method. In short, the symmetric authentication method allows for offline password recovery, and to make it even worse, there is no password strong enough to withstand it. In the next post, we will see their public-key solution to the offline cracking problem, and how it was also broken.