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In the series of posts this month we've been looking at network ports relevant to security administrators. This note explores the ports used for Active Directory (AD) communications, which is a topic particularly relevant for allowing AD traffic across a firewall. For instance, you may be wondering which ports to open to allow AD replication across internal subnets, or to allow an AD member server on a screened subnet to authenticate to a domain controller on another subnet. AD-Related Ports Active Directory communications involve a number of ports, some of which are more familiar to network and security administrators than others. These were outlined in the Active Directory Replication over Firewalls article by Steve Riley:
For a full listing of AD-related services, see Microsoft's support article 832017 Service Overview and Network Port Requirements for the Windows Server System. Which of these ports actually need to be allowed through the firewall depends on the scenario you're implementing and on your environment. For instance, support for NetBIOS services may unnecessary in situations where you have newer Windows systems supporting the SMB over IP protocol. Similarly, newer Windows environments make use DNS, instead of Windows for name resolution. AD Replication The ports that need to be open to facilitate cross-firewall AD replication differ, depending on the versions of Microsoft Windows in your environment. Microsoft provides OS-specific guidelines in its Active Directory and Active Directory Domain Services Port Requirements article. For instance, replication between servers that use Windows 2000 or 2003 require the following ports open bidirectionally on the firewall that's between the servers:
To restrict the use of RPC ports, follow instructions in Microsoft's support article 224196 Restricting Active Directory Replication Traffic and Client RPC Traffic to a Specific Port and a TechNet blog entry Dynamic Client Ports in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. Authentication to AD AD uses the following ports to support user and computer authentication, according to the Active Directory and Active Directory Domain Services Port Requirements article:
Tunneling AD Traffic Using IPSec If you don't like having to open this many ports, you could use IPSec to tunnel the traffic across the firewall. You could use ESP with encryption disabled, so the packets would still be cryptographically signed and tunneled, but your intrusion detection systems (IDS) would still have visibility into the traffic. Jason Fossen, who teaches the Securing Windows class at SANS, shared with us additional insights regarding the use of IPSec:
The Use of AD in the DMZ or a Screened Subnet Jason Fossen also shared his thoughts on architecting AD in environments where some Windows servers reside close to the network's perimeter, such as in the DMZ or a screened subnet. He recommending implementing a separate forest for DMZ servers that need to be domain members (perhaps with a one-way cross-forest trust to the internal forest), rather than joining DMZ servers to the internal forest directly. Jason continued: The DMZ controller(s) will be located in a new perimeter network attached to a firewalling device. When implementing a cross-forest trust, after configuring groups and permissions on the DMZ servers (which requires LDAP traffic), the only traffic that must be allowed through the firewall is Kerberos. If the DMZ servers must be joined to the internal forest, then it’s better to place Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODC) in another perimeter network of the firewall for the sake of the DMZ servers. Also, with the use of PKI, RADIUS, reverse proxy servers, etc., it has become less necessary to either join DMZ servers to the internal forest or to establish a one-way cross-forest trust from the DMZ forest to the internal one, even when users must authenticate with the internal forest credentials. Jason's SANS course explores this topic in detail. This note outlined the key points for AD traffic considerations. For additional guidelines, read through the articles referenced in the text above. Liked this? Post it to Twitter! -- Lenny Lenny Zeltser - Security Consulting |
Lenny 216 Posts ISC Handler |
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Oct 27th 2009 9 years ago |
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I think it is worth mentioning that most modern firewalls support dynamically opening the ports allocated by the RPC Endpoint Mapper to one degree or another. Some go as far as defining which RPC services you want to allow through.
Regards, John Berkers |
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Oct 27th 2009 9 years ago |
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