Tag: RPZ

Configuring and Using RPZ

I realized today what, while I had written about why response policy zones are useful, I never indicated how to configure one! So here’s a quick document outlining how to set it up in ISC Bind. In your named.conf file, add a response policy to your options section:

        response-policy {
                zone “rpz”;
        };
Then add the correspondingly named zone at the end of the file. For purposes of testing, I added a zone as a forward only zone so I could perform a network capture to see what exactly transpires when a name in the RPZ is resolved.
zone “rpz” {
      type master;
      file “rpz.db”;
      allow-query { none; };
      allow-transfer { none; };
};
zone “windstream.com” {
    type forward;
    forward only;
    forwarders { 8.8.8.8; };
};
Then you just have to make a rpz.db where you store your named files:
$TTL 60
$ORIGIN rpz.
@            IN    SOA  localhost. root.localhost.  (
                          2   ; serial
                          3H  ; refresh
                          1H  ; retry
                          1W  ; expiry
                          1H) ; minimum
                  IN    NS    localhost.

www.windstream.com    CNAME    www.yahoo.com.
Restarted named and ran “rndc flush” to avoid serving cached content instead of the RPZ host data. Then ran a few tests and confirmed that the resolution configured in the rpz zone:
[lisa@fedora02 named]# dig +short www.windstream.com @localhost
www.yahoo.com.
atsv2-fp.wg1.b.yahoo.com.
98.139.183.24
98.138.252.30
98.139.180.149
98.138.253.109
[lisa@fedora02 named]# dig +short dell905.windstream.com @localhost
ns4.windstream.com.
173.186.244.139
[lisa@fedora02 named]# dig +short www.google.com @localhost
216.58.218.228
In this process, I learnt something interesting about ICS’s implementation of RPZ: it still performs the query and then overrides the results. Odd waste of cycles, but the resolution that was subsequently turned into yahoo’s address from the rpz zone. Looking up a windstream.com host that isn’t in my RPZ and I got another query out to 8.8.8.8 which was expected. Query to something not in the forward zone and not in the rpz zone and I get no traffic to 8.8.8.8 (because it follows my normal forwarding which is to our ISP’s DNS).
I was curious if this meant rpz could not be used to publish a bad hostname locally – but attempting to resolve a bad hostname (added abadhost.windstream.com with the same CNAME to Yahoo and reloaded my zone) worked just fine.

[root@fedora02 ~]# dig abadhost.windstream.com @localhost

; <<>> DiG 9.11.1-P2-RedHat-9.11.1-2.P2.fc26 <<>> abadhost.windstream.com @localhost
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 8382
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 3

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
; COOKIE: 1aa34751c5df7f78857a921259a8706fb5e1741a46eb5352 (good)
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;abadhost.windstream.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
abadhost.windstream.com. 5 IN CNAME www.yahoo.com.
www.yahoo.com. 1800 IN CNAME atsv2-fp.wg1.b.yahoo.com.
atsv2-fp.wg1.b.yahoo.com. 60 IN A 98.139.180.149
atsv2-fp.wg1.b.yahoo.com. 60 IN A 98.138.253.109
atsv2-fp.wg1.b.yahoo.com. 60 IN A 98.139.183.24
atsv2-fp.wg1.b.yahoo.com. 60 IN A 98.138.252.30

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
wg1.b.yahoo.com. 172800 IN NS yf3.a1.b.yahoo.net.
wg1.b.yahoo.com. 172800 IN NS yf4.a1.b.yahoo.net.
wg1.b.yahoo.com. 172800 IN NS yf1.yahoo.com.
wg1.b.yahoo.com. 172800 IN NS yf2.yahoo.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
yf1.yahoo.com. 86400 IN A 68.142.254.15
yf2.yahoo.com. 86400 IN A 68.180.130.15

;; Query time: 1204 msec
;; SERVER: ::1#53(::1)
;; WHEN: Thu Aug 31 16:24:15 EDT 2017
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 315

But there is a query that goes out to the name server and a ‘no such name’ result returned. Odd.

Response Policy Zone (RPZ)

Years ago, Paul Vixie developed a component of the BIND DNS server that allowed server owners to easily override specific hostnames. We had done something similar for particularly bad hostnames — if your workstations use your DNS servers, you just have to declare yourself the name server for a domain that has the same name as the hostname you want to block (i.e. I become the NS record for forbidden.google.com and my clients are able to resolve all other records within the google.com zone, but when they resolve forbidden.google.com … they get whatever I provide). I usually did this to route traffic over a B2B VPN – provided the private IP address instead of the public IP provided by the domain owner’s name servers. But for a few really bad malware variants, I overrode their hostname. Problem was the technique wasn’t exactly easy. Every single host required a new DNS zone be created, configured on your DNS servers, and (at least in BIND) the service restarted.

Response Policy Zone was pushed as a functionality that would allow service providers (ISPs). That’s not a use case I forsee (it’s a lot of manual work), but it has become an important component of our company’s network security. Hosting an RPZ domain allows us to easily add new overrides for B2B VPN connected hosts. But it also means we can override hostnames that appear in phishing e-mail campaigns, malware hosts, infected web sites … basically anything we don’t want employees accessing.

Stopping clients from accessing infected sites is a great thing; but for hostnames that are indicative of a compromised box (i.e. there’s a difference between an employee clicking on a link within their e-mail that links them to a specific host and someone having malware on their box that automatically contacts a specific host), we set the IP address for the hostname to a honeypot.

The honeypot is bound to all unused ports on the host (there aren’t a lot of used ports on it), logs all contact to a database, then basically hangs the connection. We have a scheduled job that looks at the contact log and opens a ticket to the desktop support team to investigate the compromised host.