How do I check the destination that a socket is connected to? - unmanaged

If,for example,The socket in my compiled application is designed to connect to 123.456.789.0.
How do I check if its connected to 123.456.789.0? Is there a way to do this?
The idea is this:I want to prevent other people editing my program and changing the address to,for example, 127.0.0.1 and make it connect through a proxy.
Is there any function/way/trick to check the address after the socket is connected?

Use the getpeername function to retrieve the address of the remote host.
If someone edits your program like you mention, they'll probably alter such a check as well though.

nos's comment about the insecurity of this approach is correct, but incomplete. You wouldn't even need to change the program's code to circumvent your proposed mechanism.
The easiest way around it would be to add an IP alias to one of the machine's network interfaces. Then a program can bind to that interface on the port your program connects to, and the OS's network stack will happily send connections to the attacker's local program, not your remote one.
So, now you say you want to know how to list the computer's interfaces so you can detect this sort of subversion. Your opponent counterattacks, launching your program as a sub-process of theirs after installing a Winsock hook that routes Winsock calls back through the parent process.
We then expect to find you asking how to read the executable code section of a particular DLL loaded into your process space, so you can check that the code is what you expect. Now your opponent drops the Winsock shim, switching to an NDIS layer filter, rewriting packets from your program right before they hit the NIC.
Next we find you looking for someone to tell how to list the drivers installed on a Windows system, so you can check that one of these filters isn't present. Your opponent thinks for about 6 seconds and decides to start screwing with packet routing, selecting one of at least three different attacks I can think of off the top of my head. (No, wait, four.)
I'm not a security expert. Yet, I've spent five minutes on this and already have your security beat seven different ways.
Are you doomed? Maybe, maybe not.
Instead of you coming up with fixes to the risks you can see, better to post a new question saying what it is you're trying to protect, and have the experts comment on risks and possible fixes. (Don't add it here. Your question is already answered, correctly, by nos. This is a different question.)
Security is hard. Expertise counts for far more in that discipline than in most other areas of computer science.

Related

Windows Named Pipes connections

I have search high and low for this answer. Can one code up a Named Pipes server where the connection that a client makes is persistent until you close the applications? This would be in C/C++. Not asking any one to actually do this, as I am capable. To explain in a little more detail if my question is not clear, I want to be able to have the client connect to the server and then be able to pass data back and forth without having to kill the connection at the end of each data transaction and then start a new one again for the next. It seams that in every example I have seen or read, the transaction only lasted for that one data exchange. That seems wasteful and extremely time consuming. Then I want to thread it so I can have up to 8 clients on the same named pipe. If you know of example code that does this, that would be great also. Already read the Microsoft examples, and they seem to be single data exchanges with new connections every time.
My confusion lies with the readfile() and writefile() functions. They need the pipe handle and pointers to the data structures just like a file R/W on the hard drive. Those files can be opened at program start, used, and then finally closed just before you exit your application. There are risks to doing this, but sometimes necessary. So I want my server application to be in control not the clients.
Thanks in advance. I will answer any questions if this is not clear to you.
I am not surprised at your answers. I was really wanting a way to keep the connection open per instance, but since this is not how pipes work, I get it. I have devised a better way to make my applications talk to each other. I originally had one server and many clients, so I turned that around and now have one client and many servers each with a different pipe name. Since my client, that was the server, did most of the initiating of the messages, I can now manage better they way I send and request the data via messages/pipes. The only draw back is not giving the data to all of them at once, but what is a few microseconds amount friends. Please let me know if this will not work as I expect it will, before I spend a lot of time on the code. Thanks. Any suggestions are welcomed.

How to get the status of a serial COM port

What I mean is that, when I code a project, I need to communicate with the serial port like COM1, COM2... but sometimes there is no device connected and I also can use the function CreateFile to get the COM port handle.
When I use the WriteFile function to send a string to the COM port the software blocks.
After I dig into the problem I find another function GetCommModemStatus which can get status of the COM port but when I use the usb-rs232 transition line, the second parameter always returns 0.
How can I get the COM port status so that I can check if is there some devices connected to the computer?
If I understand correctly, you want to detect if a device is connected to your COM port and ready to accept packets. If that's the case, you need to check control signals (DTR/DSR and CTS/RTS) before sending data, assuming your device is aware of them and sets the appropriate PIN on your DB-9 or DB-25 connector. Some devices rely on software handshaking instead (XON/XOFF) and do not set control signals. Your best bet would be to consult documentation of your device.
I have been using ComPort Library version 4.10 by Dejan Crnila. It does support both hardware and software handshakings, so you can focus on your own code instead of reinventing the wheel.
As several people have already pointed out, it is not a good idea to try to "re-invent the wheel." Except for "quick and dirty" testing, your code will have to handle the com port in a separate thread and the available solutions all make this much easier.
BUT, if you Really want to do it, I'll give you some pointers.
If you are using "WriteFile" then you have probably already figured out the "CreateFile" part of the procedure and how complicated things can get depends upon what kind of IO you specified in that procedure, Overlapped or not. Overlapped IO is more complicated but does let the OS handle some of the burden.
You mentioned that your call to "WriteFile" hangs. You should look up the "SetCommTimeOuts" function. Setting both the WriteTotalTimeoutMultiplier and WriteTotalTimeoutConstant members of TCommTimeouts to zero will tell the OS to return immediately. You may also need to "SetCommMask" if your target uses handshaking.
What happens next really depends on what your target is supposed to do. The GetCommMask function can be used to check the status of the handshake lines.

Getting specific errors when TCP connections disconnect in Windows

I'm trying to improve the usefulness of the error reporting in a server I am working on. The server uses TCP sockets, and it runs on Windows.
The problem is that when a TCP link drops due to some sort of network failure, the error code that I can get from WSARecv() (or the other Windows socket APIs) is not very descriptive. For most network hiccups, I get either WSAECONNRESET (10054) or WSAETIMEDOUT (10060). But there are about a million things that can cause both of these: the local machine is having a problem, the remote machine or process is having a problem, some intermediate router has a problem, etc. This is a problem because the server operator doesn't have a definitive way to investigate the problem, because they don't necessarily even know where the problem is, or who might be responsible.
At the IP level, it's a different story. If the server operator happens to have a network sniffer attached when something bad happens, it's usually pretty easy to sort of what went wrong. For instance, if an intermediate router sent an ICMP unreachable, the router that sent it will put its IP address in there, and that's usually enough to track it down. Put another way, Windows killed the connection for a reason, probably because it got a specific packet that had a specific problem.
However, a large number of failures are experienced in the field, unexpected. It is not realistic to always have a network sniffer attached to a production server. There needs to be a way to track down problems that happen only rarely, intermittently, or randomly.
How can I solve this problem programmatically?
Is there a way to get Windows to cough up a more specific error message? Is there some easy way to capture and mine recent Windows events (perhaps the one Microsoft Network Monitor uses)? One way I've "solved it" before is to keep dumpcap (from Wireshark) running in ring buffer mode, and force it to stop capturing when a bad event happens, that I can mine later.
I'm also open to the possibility that this is not the right way to solve this problem. For instance, perhaps there is some special Windows mode that can be turned on to cause it to log useful information, that a network administrator could use to track this down after-the-fact.

Windows API Clear Authentication Tokens

I'm using the WNetEnumResource to enumerate all network share connections and WNetCancelConnection2 to close them. Then I am using WNetUseConnection to connect to a share using discrete credentials. This process happens multiple times throughout the day.
The problem that I'm running into is that after the first flow through the process I'm getting:
System Error 1219 has occurred.
Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user,
using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all
previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again.
This happens even when the enumeration says there are no current connections.
My question is: why? Why am I getting this error? Is the authenticated connection to the server still cached? Can I enumerate these authentication tokens? Kerberos? LSA?
I haven't been able to find the smallest foothold of information to progress forward on this project. Any help is appreciated!
I'm trying to remember the solution we used when we came across this problem for a network backup program a few years ago.
I'm certain the solution involves using either WNetAddConnection2 or WNetAddConnection3 instead of WNetUseConnection. I think that passing the flag CONNECT_CRED_RESET should take care of this, but I'm not absolutely certain.
Note that CONNECT_CRED_RESET is only documented for WNetAddConnection2 and not WNetAddConnection3, though MSDN says the only difference between the two is the hWnd parameter for owner of dialog windows - I'd try with WNetAddConnection2 and only if it works, experiment with WNetAddConnection3. You may even get it to work with WNetUseConnection!
Make sure to note the dependencies CONNECT_CRED_RESET has on other flags.

Multiple connections in a single SSH SOCKS 5 Proxy

My fist question here on Stackoverflow: What should I need to do so that the SSH SOCKS 5 Proxy (SSH2) will allow multiple connections?
What I have noticed, is that when I load a page in Firefox (already configured to use the SOCKS 5 proxy), it loads everything one by one. It can be perceived by bare eyes, and I also confirm that through the use of Firebug's NET tab, which logs the connections that have been made.
I have already configure some of the directives in the about:config page, like pipeline, persistent proxy connections, and a few other things. But I still get this kind of sequential load of resources, which is noticeably very slow.
network.http.pipelining;true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests;8
network.http.pipelining.ssl;true
network.http.proxy.pipelining;true
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy;100
network.proxy.socks_remote_dns;true
My ISP sucks because during the day, it intentionally breaks connections on a random basis. And so, it is impossible to actually accomplish meaningful works without the need of a lot of browser refresh or hitting F5 key. So, that is why I started to find solutions to this.
The SSH's dynamic port forwarding is the best solution I find to date, because it has some pretty good compression which saves a lot of useless traffic, and is also secure. The only thing remaining is to get it to have multiple connections running in it.
Thanks for all the inputs.
I have had the same thoughts and my conclusion is that it should already have multiple connections going through the socks proxy. This is because if you view the ssh connection with -vvv flag, you'll notice it opening up different ports for the different requests.
I think it may have something to do with SSH-over-TCP itself; plus, perhaps, some extra inefficiencies and/or bugs in the implementations. Are you using only OpenSSH on Mac OS X / *BSD / Linux, or is this PuTTY on Windows?
Your situation is actually pretty much exactly why SCTP was developed (as a TCP replacement), which has a notion of multiple streams from within a single connection.
Hopefully, we'll have SSH over SCTP readily available one day. The best part about SCTP is that it'd still work over IPv4, i.e. it is supposedly mostly a matter of only the endhosts having support for it, so, unlike IPv6, you wouldn't have to wait for your lazy ISP (at leasts, theoretically).

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