Port Knocking

A few months ago, a friend of mine told me about the concept of port knocking, where you send packets to a server on certain ports to authenticate access to the box. A daemon running on your server detects the sequence of packets that you send and runs a script (usually IPtables commands), waits a certain amount of time, then runs another script (usually to take the IPtables commands out). This seems like a good way to get access to your home firewall from anywhere without having to open up access to the whole Internet.

To set it up, you have to install knock, which is the daemon that listens to the port knocking. Just use yum or apt-get to install it and you’ll wind up with the configuration file in /etc/knockd.conf. This is where you set up one or more knock sequences to do what you want. I won’t go into the internals of how it works or how you should set it up but I will go into a few examples.

I use port knocking on my home network to protect administrative access to everything on the network. I wrote a custom IPtables script that, when activated, open access from my IP on the wireless network to SSH (TCP/22) on my firewall, file server, access point, and switch. After 30 seconds, another script runs, and those rules are removed. Here’s an example of a config file that opens up SSH when you hit ports 1234, 5678, 9876, and 5432. After 30 seconds, it kills the rule.

[options]
logfile = /var/log/knockd.log

[openssh]
sequence = 1234, 5678, 9876, 5432
seq_timeout = 5
tcpflags = syn
start_command = -A INPUT -s %IP% -d 192.168.1.1 –dport 22 -j ACCEPT
cmd_timeout = 30
stop_command = -D INPUT -s %IP% -d 192.168.1.1 –dport 22 -j ACCEPT

So, how do you generate these packets? On my CentOS boxes, you get the knock command which is the port knocking client. On Windows, I use KnockKnock. I have no clue about Macs, but there are lots and lots of clients out there, so just look around and I’m sure you’ll find one.