InputOutput.io

I’ll be heading out to Defcon 19 next month, so I want my VPN connection to be stable and secure.

You probably know the situation. You’re at your local coffee shop, using their (hopefully not) wide-open unsecured wifi hotspot. But you’re smart enough not to send all your data out over the clear, since there might be malicious script kiddies ready to take your sensitive data and sell it to kids on the street. So you use a VPN. You fire up OpenVPN and connect to your VPN service. Then you start browsing, comforted by the fact that your traffic is encapsulated in a secure SSL tunnel. Better yet, the user experience is transparent: you don’t have to configure your applications to manually use a SOCKS5 proxy. OpenVPN handles your routing tables and creates a virtual interface using the tun module. It’s so simple, you don’t need to think about it. But there’s a problem with this setup.

No one can reach into your stream and extract or insert data, but there’s a caveat. Anyone can destroy your TCP stream by sending you a spoofed RST packet from the remote server, or otherwise making the service unavailable to you. Destroying the TCP stream destroys the virtual (tun) interface, which, in turn, destroys the routes associated with that interface. Now you’re using your physical interface unprotected from those pesky hackers. Worse still, you don’t realize it. Not a thing has changed from the perspective of user experience. Since everything is transparent, you don’t notice any change at all. Now you’re screwed.

Little did you know that this all could have been avoided by our friend iptables. Sure, you could modify your routes further to ensure that only traffic going to the remote server goes over your physical interface, but that’s too easy. Plus, routing tables aren’t intended for security, they’re inteded to move packets along. iptables seems like the tool for the task, so I modified a script I found here to make sure that we disallow any traffic that we don’t want:

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then
	echo "This script must be run as root" 1>&2
	exit 1
fi

# name of primary network interface (before tunnel)
PRIMARY=wlan0

# address of tunnel server
SERVER=seattle.vpn.riseup.net
# address of vpn server
VPN_SERVER=seattle.vpn.riseup.net

# gateway ip address (before tunnel - adsl router ip address)
# automatically determine the ip from the default route
GATEWAY=`route -n | grep $PRIMARY | egrep "^0\.0\.0\.0" | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f2`

# provided by pppd: interface name
TUNNEL=tun0

openvpn --config /my/path/to/riseup.ovpn --auth-user-pass /my/path/to/authentication.conf &

# iptables rules - important!

#LOCAL_NET=192.168.0.0/16
LOCAL_NET=$GATEWAY

# Flush all previous filter rules, you might not want to include this line if you already have other rules setup
iptables -t filter --flush

iptables -t filter -X MYVPN
iptables -t filter -N MYVPN

# Exceptions for local traffic & vpn server
iptables -t filter -A MYVPN -o lo -j RETURN
iptables -t filter -A MYVPN -o ${TUNNEL} -j RETURN
iptables -t filter -A MYVPN --dst 127.0.0.1 -j RETURN
iptables -t filter -A MYVPN --dst $LOCAL_NET -j RETURN
iptables -t filter -A MYVPN --dst ${SERVER} -j RETURN
iptables -t filter -A MYVPN --dst ${VPN_SERVER} -j RETURN
# Add extra local nets here as necessary

iptables -t filter -A MYVPN -j DROP

# MYVPN traffic leaving this host:
iptables -t filter -A OUTPUT -p tcp --syn -j MYVPN
iptables -t filter -A OUTPUT -p icmp -j MYVPN
iptables -t filter -A OUTPUT -p udp -j MYVPN

echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf

You’ll want to modify the openvpn command, interfaces, and servers to meet your needs. And that’s it! If your stream is taken down, you have these rules to protect you. I have this script as a post-connect hook for any untrusted networks I connect to (wicd is a nice network manager for adding hooks). Later, if you want your traffic to go over the clear again, you can use this script:

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then
	echo "This script must be run as root" 1>&2
	exit 1
fi

iptables -t filter --flush
iptables -t filter -X MYVPN