COMMAND
Gauntlet
SYSTEMS AFFECTED
NAI Gauntlet 5.0, 5.5
PROBLEM
John Abramson found following. In some circumstances NAI Gauntlet
firewall performs Network Address Translation in an unexpected
manner, causing incorrect routable IP addresses to be generated.
This can enable unprivileged users on the protected network to
(knowingly or unknowingly) generate spurious source IP addresses.
Affected software is Gauntlet for NT 5.0 (unpatched, and with
hotfixes 1,2,3) and Gauntlet for NT 5.5 (unpatched, and with SP1
and hotfixes 1,2,3,4), on NT Server 4 SP4 and SP6a. Probably
other Gauntlet and NT revisions. Environment in which this
vulnerability was tested was protected internal network using
private address range 192.168.1.x. Gauntlet configured with
dynamic NAT on external interface to translate all 192.168.1.x to
a single legal address e.g. xxx.yyy.199.252. Packet screening
rules allow ICMP from internal to external, with reply allowed,
i.e. internal users can ping external addresses.
Internal user (no special privileges) on 192.168.1.10 does
continuous pings to (e.g.) www.nai.com, and receives replies as
expected. Internal user on 192.168.1.20 does continuous pings to
(e.g.) www.nai.com but gets no replies. Gauntlet "Active maps"
window shows that 192.168.1.10 is correctly mapped to
xxx.yyy.199.252, but that 192.168.1.20 is mapped to
xxx.yyy.199.253. If further pings are initiated from other
systems, they will be mapped to xxx.yyy.199.254, then
xxx.yyy.199.255, then xxx.yyy.200.0 and so on. This is confirmed
by Sniffing the FW external interface (The mapped address
sometimes increments by 2 instead of 1).
This could at least lead to DoS of systems which legitimately own
the second and subsequent mapped routable addresses; maybe there
are worse effects. There are probably other scenarios which will
trigger the problem.
SOLUTION
NAI were informed of this back in December 1999 (Tar#43547); their
support people were quite helpful and said they had replicated the
fault, and passed it to their development engineers. They are
still working on it.
NAI told John that their dynamic NAT works by mapping a source IP
address plus TCP/UDP port number; since we're using ICMP there
are no port numbers so it doesn't work properly. . .