SSL Orchestrator Advanced Use Cases: DNS-over-HTTPS Detection

[Kevin_Stewart]

Introduction

F5 BIG-IP is synonymous with "flexibility". You likely have few other devices in your architecture that provide the breadth of capabilities that come native with the BIG-IP platform. And for each and every BIG-IP product module, the opportunities to expand functionality are almost limitless. In this article series we examine the flexibility options of the F5 SSL Orchestrator in a set of "advanced" use cases.

If you haven't noticed, the world has been steadily moving toward encrypted communications. Everything from web, email, voice, video, chat, and IoT is now wrapped in TLS, and that's a good thing. The problem is, malware - that thing that creates havoc in your organization, that exfiltrates personnel records to the Dark Web - isn't stopped by encryption. TLS 1.3 and multi-factor authentication don't eradicate malware. The only reasonable way to defend against it is to catch it in the act, and an entire industry of security products are designed for just this task. But ironically, encryption makes this hard. You can't protect against what you can't see. F5 SSL Orchestrator simplifies traffic decryption and malware inspection, and dynamically orchestrates traffic to your security stack. But it does much more than that. SSL Orchestrator is built on top of F5's BIG-IP platform, and as stated earlier, is abound with flexibility. Let us now explore one perspective of that flexibility and how SSL Orchestrator can be used to handle DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS.

SSL Orchestrator Use Case: DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS Handling

Despite the rapid evolution of Internet standards, and increasing amount of encryption, there's one aspect of our daily online world that hasn't really changed that much in its nearly 4 decades of breath. That of course is DNS. We don't tend to think about it often, which is probably why it hasn't evolved as much as other things, but it truly is the heart and backbone of everything we do online. That is, unless you want to memorize "2607:f8b0:400a:0804:0000:0000:0000:2004" as the way to get to Google, you had better have a working DNS. But DNS is inherently insecure. It's been shown to be vulnerable to all manner of attacks, and for the purposes of this discussion specifically, also exposes where you're going. That is, while the HTTP payload may be encrypted, there's still that (visible) DNS request that goes out first. That's not to say that there haven't been any improvements though. DNSSEC was developed to help secure DNS and prevent spoofing, but in the many years since its introduction it still isn't as widespread as we'd have hoped. DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT) are more recent developments that focus mainly on the privacy aspect of DNS communications (or lack thereof). With DoH and DoT, clients and servers forego the typical DNS protocol request over UDP or TCP port 53 and embed the request inside an encrypted HTTPS or pure TLS connection.

But...while that sounds pretty cool, there can be additional consequences to encrypting DNS, both good and bad:

• [Good] DoH and DoT can protect against ISPs that use your DNS information for targeted advertising.

• [Bad] DoH and DoT can effectively blind local DNS security and filtering controls. DNS monitoring is often an effective defense against spam and malware infections.

• [Bad] DoH and DoT providers are public services (ex. Cloudflare and Google), so while DNS is being protected from eavesdropping along the way, the providers have access to your DNS requests.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) actually published a warning on this:

https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jan/14/2002564889/-1/-1/0/CSI_ADOPTING_ENCRYPTED_DNS_U_OO_102904_21.P...

The basic idea in this document is that while your DNS privacy is a good thing, encrypted DoH and DoT can also mask malware command-and-control. If you strictly follow the NSA guidance, you could either block DoH and/or DoT altogether, or force users to only use a local enterprise DoH resolver. If you don't have access to a local DoH resolver though, what else could you do? Well, I'm so glad you asked. DoH and DoT are of course encrypted, so unless you disable either protocol at the client, set up a local DoH resolver and force clients to it, or attempt to do encrypted analysis to find DoH traffic, you need to decrypt and inspect. And as it turns out, F5 has an elegant solution to do just that. In this blog post I am going to present a few solutions on how to handle these protocols through SSL Orchestrator decrypted analysis. The protocol implementations of DoH and DoT are a little different, so I will address them separately.

Handling DNS-over-HTTPS

For all intents and purposes, DoH looks and feels like normal HTTPS traffic. There are some semi-unique patterns you might be able to follow to infer that something is DoH rather than regular HTTPS (i.e., packet size, frequency), but it’s never going to be completely accurate. You could also potentially filter on the IP addresses of the known public DoH services, but that list is rather large and growing: https://github.com/curl/curl/wiki/DNS-over-HTTPS, and clients can ultimately choose the service they point to. If you’re serious about actually detecting DoH traffic with reasonable accuracy, then there’s no better way than through decrypted analysis. Now, once you've decrypted HTTPS and detected that it's DoH, there are a number of things you can do:

• Simply detect and block: there are actually three forms of DoH requests – Wireformat GET and POST, and JSON (detailed here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/dns-over-https), though the vast majority of clients use the Wireformat GET and POST methods. In any case, this option follows the NSA's first recommendation to simply detect and block DoH requests. A browser that receives a reject on a DoH request will natively revert to normal TCP/UDP DNS to allow your local DNS security tools to do what they do best.

• Detect and log: you may simply want to log that DoH is passing through your network, who's asking, and what they're asking for as an extension to your current DNS monitoring protocols.

• Detect and blackhole: also, as a possible extension to your current DNS protection protocols, you may need to block some DoH requests from happening. As mentioned earlier, if you simply block DoH, the client will revert to DNS. One of the best ways to block a DoH/DNS request is to provide a good but fake response instead, a technique called "blackholing". In this approach, you can flag specific hostnames (matching on URL categories) to provide a blackhole response.

Let’s now look at each of the above options in turn. The first option is actually pretty straightforward. You just need to add the below iRule to an SSL Orchestrator outbound layer 3 topology*, on the “-in-t” TCP tunnel virtual server. On any decrypted HTTPS traffic, the iRule examines the HTTP request methods for the three signature DoH methods and sends a reject on a match. Easy peasy.

when HTTP_REQUEST priority 750 {
  if { ( [HTTP::method] equals "GET" and [HTTP::header exists "accept"] and [HTTP::header "accept"] equals "application/dns-json" ) or \
     ( [HTTP::method] equals "GET" and [HTTP::header exists "accept"] and [HTTP::header "accept"] equals "application/dns-message" ) or \
     ( [HTTP::method] equals "POST" and [HTTP::header exists "content-type"] and [HTTP::header "content-type"] equals "application/dns-message" ) } {     
     reject
  }
}

The second two options above are available in a single iRule here: https://github.com/f5devcentral/sslo-script-tools/tree/main/sslo-dns-over-https-detection. 

As with the previous, import the iRule to the BIG-IP, then associate that iRule with an SSL Orchestrator outbound layer 3 topology*. You'll need to make a few adjustments in the iRule to suit for your environment, and those are all presented as simple static variable assignments:

• static::LOCAL_LOG: enable or disable local Syslog logging (0 = off, 1 = on).

• static::HSL: enable or disable remote high-speed logging (0 = off, 1 = on).

• static::URLDB_LICENSED: set to 1 (on) if you've licensed and provisioned the subscription based URLDB, or 0 (off) if you have not and want to just use custom URL categories for DoH blackholing.

• static::BLACKHOLE_URLCAT: leave empty to disable or add a list of URL categories to search for URL-based DoH blackholing (ex. /Common/block-doh-urls)

• static::BLACKHOLE_RTYPE_A: enable or disable blackholing matched A record requests (0 = off, 1 = on).

• static::BLACKHOLE_RTYPE_AAAA: enable or disable blackholing matched AAAA record requests (0 = off, 1 = on).

• static::BLACKHOLE_RTYPE_TXT: enable or disable blackholing matched TXT record requests (0 = off, 1 = on).

You can quickly test the solution by enabling DoH support in a browser. Please refer to the following instructions for each: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-over-https/encrypted-dns-browsers/. With the static::LOCAL_LOG value set to 1 (enabled), you can tail the BIG-IP LTM log (tail -f /var/log/ltm) and watch the DoH traffic flow across the SSL Orchestrator topology.

10.1.10.50:59804-104.18.42.171:443 :: DoH (WireFormat POST) Request: A:www.google.com
10.1.10.50:59804-104.18.42.171:443 :: DoH (WireFormat POST) Request: A:encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com
10.1.10.50:59804-104.18.42.171:443 :: DoH (WireFormat POST) Request: A:fonts.gstatic.com
10.1.10.50:59812-104.18.42.171:443 :: DoH (WireFormat POST) Request: A:www.gstatic.com
10.1.10.50:59812-104.18.42.171:443 :: DoH (WireFormat POST) Request: A:id.google.com
10.1.10.50:59812-104.18.42.171:443 :: DoH (WireFormat POST) Request: A:play.google.com

Handling DNS-over-TLS

DNS-over-TLS (DoT) is essentially plain DNS wrapped in TLS. If you decrypt it, you’ll see a regular DNS request. DoT by standard, travels on TCP port 853, so that’s one very simple way to block DoT traffic, by just blocking that port. But if you wanted to actually log the DoT requests flowing through the BIG-IP, or blackhole some URLs, you again have to decrypt. The aforementioned DoH logging iRule can also handle DoT requests, inspecting any decrypted TCP:853 traffic: https://github.com/f5devcentral/sslo-script-tools/tree/main/sslo-dns-over-https-detection. The same static variable flags apply.

Considering DoH/DoT proxy options

I would be remiss in not mentioning options to actually proxy DoH and DoT traffic, and BIG-IP 16.1 introduced two new capabilities:

• DoH proxy – where the BIG-IP proxies client DoH requests to external DoH resources. You get to explicitly decrypt here, so you get another opportunity to log and control the DNS.
• DoH server – where the BIG-IP proxies client DoH requests to external TPC or UDP DNS resources. As with the proxy option, you get to decrypt the client’s DoH request.

You can find out more about both of these capabilities here: https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K05451012

To proxy DoT to DoT, you simply need a TCP:853 virtual server with client and server SSL profiles. There are also various programmatic options to convert DoT to DNS, DNS to DoT, and DNS to DoH. But an important consideration here is that to proxy you would need clients to direct their DNS/DoT/DoH requests to your local resource. In some cases, you can do that through DHCP, or through enterprise browser policy management, but other than simply blocking outbound access to these protocols, it can be non-trivial to prevent clients from trying to use any of the external providers. That is specifically where decrypted analysis can be beneficial.

Summary

With an iRule and just a few configuration changes we have been able to implement a capability on top of SSL Orchestrator to log and actively control encrypted DNS. Decrypted inspection of DoH and DoT is just one of the many interesting benefits of and SSL Orchestrator solution.

A demo of the above is available here: SSL Orchestrator Advanced Use Case: DNS over HTTPS 

* The iRules will also technically work for outbound layer 2 topologies.

[Kevin_Stewart]

SSL Orchestrator Advanced Use Cases: DNS-over-HTTPS Detection