I am trying to reverse engineer a third-party TCP client / server Windows XP, SP 3 app for which I have no source available. My main line of attack is to use WireShark to capture TCP traffic.
When I issue a certain GUI command on the client side, the client creates a TCP connection to the server, sends some data, and tears down the connection. The server port is 1234, and the client port is assigned by the OS and therefore varies.
WireShark is showing that the message corresponding to the GUI command I issued gets sent twice. The two messages bear a different source port, but they have the same destination port (1234, as mentioned previosuly).
The client side actually consists of several processes, and I would like to determine which processes are sending these messages. These processes are long-lived, so their PIDs are stable and known. However, the TCP connections involved are transient, lasting only a few milliseconds or so. Though I've captured the client-side port numbers in WireShark and though I know all of the PIDs involved, the fact the connections are transient makes it difficult to determine which PID opened the port. (If the connections were long-lived, I could use netstat to map port numbers to PIDs.) Does anybody have any suggestions on how I can determine which processes are creating these transient connections?
I can think of two things:
Try sysinternals' tcpview program. It gives a detailed listing of all tcp connections opened by all the processes in the system. If a process creates connections, you will be able to see them flash (both connect and disconnect are flashed) in tcpview and you will know which processes to start looking into.
Try running the binary under a debugger. Windbg supports multi-process debugging (so does visual studio I think). You may have only export symbols to work with but that should still work for calls made to system dlls. Try breaking on any suspected windows APIs you know will be called by the process to create the connections. MSDN should have the relevant dlls for most system APIs documented.
Start here... post a follow-up if you get stuck again.
I ended up creating a batch file that runs netstat in a tight loop and appends its output to a text file. I ran this batch file while running the system, and by combing through all of the netstat dumps, I was able to find a dump that contained the PIDs associated with the ports.
Related
How do I close tcp v4 and tcp v6 connections on Windows? I don't want to kill the entire process that has the open connection as this obviously will kick everyone else off that process. I need to do this from a separate process, and so will not have access to socket handles, etc. I am using Windows API to get tcp table, etc. so I know which connections are active.
One way might be to enumerate all open handles on the system, or at least the open handles of a given target process, until you find the SOCKET handle you are interested in (see HOWTO: Enumerate handles, Socket Handles, and C++ Get Handle of Open Sockets of a Program - though I'm not sure how you would be able to retrieve the IP/Port pairs of a SOCKET to compare to the active connection you are interested in, without injecting remote getsockname()/getpeername() calls into the owning process of the SOCKET).
Once you have found the SOCKET handle you want, you can then close it by using DuplicateHandle() with the DUPLICATE_CLOSE_SOURCE flag 1.
1: This is how the "Close Handle" feature in Process Explorer works.
Since I'm using C#, I cannot PInvoke SetTcpEntry, even as administrator with an app.manifest file, it always sends a 317 error. So I created a C++ .exe to close a comma separated list of ipv4 addresses on the command line using SetTcpEntry, works fine even without an app.manifest file. That solves kicking ipv4 connections.
I tried using the get handles approach with NtQuerySystemInformation but never could get it working quite right, and it is a private mostly undocumented API and seems unsafe to use.
So, for ipv6, I am using windivert and injecting RST flag to ipv6 packets with certain ip addresses. It is as simple as setting the RST flag of an incoming packet before sending it on through with windivert. The downside is, if the client never sends another packet, the ipv6 socket still stays open indefinitely.
Perhaps someday Microsoft will add a SetTcpEntry6 function, but until then this appears to be the only realistic way.
UPDATE 2022-05-01, found this gem at https://www.x86matthew.com/view_post?id=settcpentry6
I am facing issue with c++ service which uses port 30015.It runs fine,but sometime it fails to start as the port 30015 is occupied and bind fails with error WSAEADDRINUSE.
I ran netstat command to know the port status
netstat -aon | findstr 30015
Output:
TCP 0.0.0.0:30015 0.0.0.0 LISTENING 6740
I checked the PID 6740 in task manager,this PID is not be taken by an process.
After searching in the net, I used TCPVIEW to see the status of the port. TCPView is showing port in listening mode and process name is "non-existance".
Application basically compress,decompress the file using 7za. Application listen on 30015 port for request and than create a child process and pass the commandline to run 7za command to compress and decompress file.
Here child process doesn't uses socket. Server runs on the main thread and listen on port 30015. This problem comes after restart of the server.
Here child process does not use socket as such. Do I need to make bInheritHandle = FALSE ?
Are you sure? This all sounds very confused. It's not possible for netstat to show a socket in the LISTEN state but for there to be no process -- especially if it shows the pid! You're confused because the process simply exited by the time you looked in Task Manager. All TCP connections in netstat are associated with a running process (except for unusual cases like TIME-WAIT sockets). So, find out which process has the socket open.
Secondly, I think you're trying to say that using bInheritHandles=TRUE as an argument to CreateProcess can lead to handle leaks. Only you have your code -- why not just look at the handles in your child and see if you do have a leak? It is only possible to use bInheritHandles=TRUE with great discipline, in the hands of novice programmers it will only lead to bugs. Create a named pipe with a suitable security descriptor, pass the name on the commandline to the child, and connect back, rather than using handle inheritance which is much too coarse-grained.
Finally, just to make sure, you do know to bind listening sockets with SO_REUSEADDR to prevent conflicting with active sockets using the same port? (SO_REUSEADDR still won't let two passive sockets be created on the same address/port combination, although it is a bit broken on Windows.)
Yes this can happen on Windows. If you've created a child process that inherits handles from the parent process then that includes TCP server sockets in the LISTEN state that will always be listed as owned by the parent PID even after that PID has died.
These sockets will disappear when all child processes that you spawned have exited, causing the reference count on their handles to reach zero.
From a security standpoint you should not use inter-process handle-inheritance, particularly when launching a 3rd part application, unless you have a good reason to need the feature.
Is it possible that windows leaks sockets connection and these sockets are not shown in tcpview and netstat?
After running a few applications that perform many network connections, my windows machine enters a state in whitch it in not able to open any new socket connection. Even to itself (localhosts).
For example, telnet to a local application failed because windows can't create new sockets.
Closing and restarting the network applications does not helps. Only full windows restart solves the problem.
netstat (& tcpview) indicates that there are only some dozens of connections.
Thanks for your help.
No, it is not possible for those apps to miss leaked connections. Something else is going on. Maybe you are not looking at their detailed views, like seeing closed sockets that are in TIME_WAIT state. If you cannot open new socket connections, you mostly likely are encountering port exhaustion. Wait some time for ports to time out and become available again. Or stop wasting ports in the first place.
I discovered almost accidentally that my machine was sending and receiving UDP packets to a machine in Poland. Not that I have any problem with Poland, I just don't know why my laptop has the need to communicate with a server there. Reverse DNS shows just the ISP providing the address to some end user. Using Wireshark, I can monitor the messages, which were indecipherable as they were probably encrypted. All packets sent from my machine had the same source port, so clearly the application that sent them opened this UDP socket to use it. I am searching for ways to:
1) enumerate all current sockets open in the system, including the process that created it and, for both TCP and UDP, what ports and addresses they are current bound to.
2) because applications can open these sockets, use them, and close them right away, I would love to find (or perhaps even write) a program that once started would somehow get notification each time a socket gets created, or really more importantly when bound to a source and/or destination address and port. For UDP, I would love to also be able to monitor/keep track of the destination IP addresses and ports that socket has sent messages to.
I don't want to monitor the traffic itself, I have Wireshark if I want to view the traffic. I want to be able to then cross reference to discover what application is generating the packets. I want to know if it is from a process I trust, or if it is something I need to investigate further.
Does anybody know of any applications (for the Windows platform) that can do this? If not, any ideas about a .NET or Windows API that provides this capability, should I want to write it myself?
Edit:
After further research - looks like the APIs to use are GetExtendedUdpTable and GetExtendedTcpTable, CodeProject.com has some samples wrapping these in .NET (see http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/14423/Getting-the-active-TCP-UDP-connections-using-the-G). So a combination of this API and some sniffer code would be needed to monitor and keep track of what hosts at what ports using what protocol any particular application on your machine is talking to. If I ever get some free time, I'll consider creating this, if you know of an app that does all this, please let me know.
Try SysInternals TCPView. Despite its name, it handles UDP as well.
netstat -b to enumerate all ports along with the process names.
You can try using SysInternals' Process MOnitor (ProcMon.exe or ProcMon64.exe).
It allows for filtering of Processes by "UDP Send" Operation - and provides detailed UDP Connection data, including source and destination addresses(IP) and ports etc.
I am trying to simulate a scenario where connection to the server of one process is down while the connection to another server is up. Just pulling the network cable won't work in my case since I need another process connection to stay up.
Is there any tool for this kind of job? I am on Windows. Thanks!
There's a few layers which you can simulate this at. The easiest would be if your two servers listen on two distinct TCP ports. In that case, you could run two tcp proxies, and stop/pause one when you want to simulate a failure. For Windows I would suggest using tcpTrace to do this.
Another option would be to have the two servers bound to two virtual NICs, which are bridged to the physical NIC. Of course if you have two physical NICs, you could bind each server process to a different physical NIC.
At a lower level, you can ran a WAN simulator. Most simulators allow you to impair specific types of traffic or specific ports. One such simulator is Packetstorm.
One other method which I would suggest is attaching a debugger to one process, and halting all threads on the process with the debugger. Often, a process doesn't die, but gets stuck in garbage collection, or in a loop. As the sockets don't close, many 'high availability' solutions won't automatically failover.
One approach would be to mock the relevant network connection code for the purposes of testing. In this case you would probably want to mock it returning whatever it usually would if the connection was down.
A poor man's approach if you can use sleep/hibernate mode on your machine :
Set an Outbound rule in the Windows Firewall to disallow connection for a particular Program.
Already connected sockets stay connected: put the machine in sleep/hibernate mode for a brief moment to force those sockets to disconnect.
When the system is restored, the program cannot establish new connections.
New connections are made possible as soon as you disable the firewall rule.
Note that it does not simulate network outage because each connection fails immediately with an permission error. But it prevents a process to establish connections.