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CAM Poisoning

This program poison the network to set the attacker in a man-in-the-middle (MitM) position, using a CAM poisoning attack.

CAM poisoning is an attack against switches which falsify the association between a MAC address and a port of the switch. The goal is to change the behavior of switches for them to send Ethernet frames to the attacker's port.

This attack is named after the CAM tables (Content Addressable Memory) of switches which store the MAC-port association.

Why using CAM poisoning instead of ARP spoofing/poisoning? Here are few thoughts

  • Advantages:

    • CAM poisoning can intercept protocols which are not IP-based
    • Frame content is legitimate compare to ARP spoofing which breaks the couple (MAC, IP): program like arpwatch won't be able to detect CAM poisoning
    • Switch protections are usually disabled

  • Disadvantages:

    • The traffic greatly increase what can be easily detected
    • It is less efficient than ARP spoofing: some frames may not be intercepted

How it works

To poison a switch, you only need to send an Ethernet frame with the poisoned MAC address as the sender. Doing so, you will receive poisoned frames until the legitimate host send new frames.

However, intercepted frames have to be retransmitted for the communications to continue and the attack to stay undetected. They cannot be sent as such because the switch may still be poisoned. It may result it the switch sending back the frames to the attacker or to discard it (switch-dependent). The program currently broadcast an ARP request to force the host to respond and restore the CAM tables.

In a nutshell, the attack is a loop consisting of the following steps:

  1. Poison the target hosts
  2. Read incoming frames for a given duration
  3. For each frame to retransmit: * Restore the destination MAC address (with ARP), * Retransmit the frame, * Restore the newly poisoned sender address.
  4. Go back to 1.

Setup

Install from the tarball

To install from the tarball, you need:

  • A C compiler and standard library headers

System-specific installation:

  • debian: sudo apt-get install build-essential
  • archlinux: sudo pacman -S base-devel

Install from the repository

To install from the repository, you need:

  • A C compiler and standard library headers
  • autotools to generate the configuration

System-specific installation:

  • debian: sudo apt-get install build-essential autotools-dev
  • archlinux: sudo pacman -S base-devel

Before compiling, the working environment need to be set up:

autoreconf --install

Compilation

From the package directory, run:

./configure
make

Installation

Once compiled, from the package directory, run:

make install

Usage

Architecture

The CAM poisoner cannot be run alone. It only handles frame interception and retransmission. It relies on an third-party program to modify intercepted frames.

Communication between the third-party program and this program is performed through UNIX domain sockets:

  • The CAM poisoner will send all intercepted frames to the third-party socket
  • The third-party socket can send back any frame to the CAM poisoner for injection in the network

For testing purposes, a tester program is compiled with the package (but not installed). It handles the role of the third-party program, but it does not modify any frames. Instead, it sends them back to the CAM poisoner for retransmission. Intercepted frames can still be explored using packet dissectors like Wireshark.

Basic usage

Important note: the program heavily relies on raw sockets which require privileges. The programs should either be run as root or with a user with CAP_NET_RAW capabilities.

First run the third-party program which will modify the frames. For testing purpose, you can use the in-package tester program:

cd /path/to/package
./src/tester

The path to the UNIX socket is given on start-up

# ./src/tester
The IPC socket has been opened here: /var/run/cam_poisoning/tester.sock
Wait for incoming packets

testing You can then start the CAM poisoner program:

cam_poisoning 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.2 /var/run/cam_poisoning/tester.sock
  • 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2 are the two hosts which must be intercepted
  • /var/run/cam_poisoning/tester.sock is the path to the UNIX socket of the third-party program

See cam_poisoning --help for a full list of options.