Windows XP VPN (PPTP)

Windows XP VPN (PPTP)

Setting up the VPN server

To setup the server end of the VPN connection, we need to create a new connection, and then check the firewall/router settings.
Firstly bring up the control panel by clicking on Start -> Control Panel. If the control panel is in Classic View as shown below, then click in Category View to see the simplified panel.

From the Category View click on Network and Internet Connections

Now click on Network Connections from the or pick a control panel icon section

Select the Create a new connection from the menu on the left of the screen

You should now see the New Connection Wizard click next to start.

Select Set up an advanced connection and click next to continue.

Select Accept incoming connections and click next to continue.

Leave the boxes unticked on this next screen and just click next to continue.

Select Allow virtual private connections and click next to continue.

You now need to pick which users are going to be allowed to vpn in. If you created a user earlier, then ensure that just that user is ticked, else pick which user you want to use - remember they need a secure password. Then click next to continue.

You can just click next to continue on this Networking Software screen, as you should already have everything you need installed, as you must already have either a modem or network card in the pc.

In the Incoming TCP/IP Properties dialog box (see below), place a check mark in the Allow Callers To Access My Local Area Network check box. This will allow VPN callers to connect to other computers on the LAN. If this check box isn’t selected, VPN callers will only be able to connect to resources on the Windows XP VPN server itself. Click OK to return to the Networking Software page and then click Next.

Granting LAN access to callers
Congratulations, you've now completed the second step in creating a VPN connection. Click Finish to close the wizard.

You should now see your new incoming connection in the Network ConnectionsWindow.

The last step is to ensure that all incoming connections use encryption (otherwise all this was for nothing !), so right click on the Incoming connections icon and select properties, then go to the second tab Users and tick the Require all users to secure their passwords and data checkbox, and then click the OK button to close the dialog

Setting up the VPN client

Now that the Server end of the VPN is set up, you need to create a vpn connection on your laptop to use whenever you are using an insecure wireless network.
Firstly bring up the control panel by clicking on Start -> Control Panel. If the control panel is in Classic View as shown below, then click in Category View to see the simplified panel.

From the Category View click on Network and Internet Connections

Now click on Network Connections from the or pick a control panel icon section

Select the Create a new connection from the menu on the left of the screen

You should now see the New Connection Wizard click next to start.

Select Connect to the workplace at my work and click next to continue.

Select Virtual Private Network as the connection type and click next to continue.

Give the new VPN connection a name and click next to continue.

If you already have a dialup or VPN connection setup on your laptop you will now be asked if you want to always dial one of these existing connections before you make the VPN connection. Because we are going to be using a wireless link to get internet connectivity select Do not dial the initial connection and click next to continue. If you don't already have a dialup or VPN connection setup then this screen will not appear, and you will go straight to the next screen.

Now enter either the hostname your ISP has given you, or the IP address they've given you and click next to continue. If you don't have a static IP address, then it may be easier to use Dynamic DNS such as from dyndns.com to give you a static hostname for your dynamic address.

Now click finish and your new VPN connection will be ready to use.


Note: If you wish to connect to this VPN server from Internet by going through the router, then you need to enable port forwarding and allowPPTP passthrough options on the router.
Note: Since PPTP VPN uses port TCP-1723, you need to do port forwarding on TCP-1723. If you have problem to do port forwarding, then take a look on this port forwarding how to article. In this example, my VPN server IP is 192.168.1.99, so I do port forwarding to this computer’s port TCP-1723 on router.

Here is how I enabled PPTP Passthrough on Linksys router. Just go to your router management page to locate this option.

Testing the VPN Setup

Now the client and server are setup, we just need to make a few final checks before testing the setup.
If you use a modem on your home pc to share your internet connection, then you should be ready to start testing, as setting up the XP VPN Server will automatically update XP's built-in firewall with the rules necessary to allow incoming VPN connections, also you must already have Internet Connection Sharing setup in order to share your internet access.
If you use a router to access the internet and share your connection between computers then you will need to poke a hole in its firewall to the VPN connection through. You will probably need to look at the manual for your router to see how this is done, but you will most likely need to setup port-forwarding on the router to forward TCP connections on port 1723 to your home computer. This should be enough for most home routers.
Instead of going to the nearest internet cafe to test your vpn connection, the easiest way is to test it from home. Use the modem in your laptop to dial your dialup ISP ( most ISPs offer a dialup service with no monthly fees ) and then dial your VPN connection to connect through to your home PC.

Once successfully connected, you should see the new incoming connection shown in the Network Connections control panel of your home pc

If it has connected ok, you should now be able to surf all your regular sites and check your email from your laptop, all through this secure connection.
Once you are happy that it is working over a dialup link, you need to go to your regular wireless internet cafe and test the connection from there. It should obviously be much faster than over a dialup, while keeping all of your web and email traffic safe from prying eyes.

For other windows versions like windows 7 it should be similiar.

Based On:

http://wireless.gumph.org/content/6/4/011-howto-xp-pptp-vpn-user.html
http://www.zdnetasia.com/configure-windows-xp-professional-to-be-a-vpn-server-39050037.htm
http://www.home-network-help.com/pptp-vpn-server.html

Linux Switch (aka Bridge)

In this post Im going to show you how to configure a bridge (switch) in Linux. Here I will present several variations tha I have tested. The base cenário is the following:

# Set the eth1 IP address on the Rigth Laptop

ifconfig eth1 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0

# Set the eth1 IP address on the Left Laptop

ifconfig eth1 10.0.0.2 netmask 255.0.0.0

Cenário 1 – No IPs on the Server NICs and Bridge

Server Configuration

# Load the bridge kernel module
modprobe bridge

# Activate eth1 and eth2 interface
ifconfig eth1 up

ifconfig eth2 up

# Create the bridge (virtual interface)
brctl addbr br0

# Add members to the bridge

brctl addif br0 eth1
brctl addif br0 eth2

Cenário 2 – No IPs on the Server NICs

Server Configuration

# Load the bridge kernel module
modprobe bridge

# Activate eth1 and eth2 interface
ifconfig eth1 up

ifconfig eth2 up

# Create the bridge (virtual interface)
brctl addbr br0

# Add members to the bridge
brctl addif br0 eth1
brctl addif br0 eth2

# Set the bridge IP address:
ifconfig br0 10.0.0.3 netmask 255.0.0.0

Now both computers are on the same LAN and can ping each other and the bridge interface, but can’t ping with the server NICs. This is like a switch with management ip.

Cenário 3 – IPs on the Server NICs and Bridge

Server Configuration

# Load the bridge kernel module
modprobe bridge

# Activate eth1 and eth2 interface
ifconfig eth1 up

ifconfig eth2 up

# Create the bridge (virtual interface)
brctl addbr br0

# Add members to the bridge
brctl addif br0 eth1
brctl addif br0 eth2

# Set the bridge IP address:
ifconfig br0 10.0.0.3 netmask 255.0.0.0

# Set the bridge IP address:
ifconfig br0 10.0.0.3 netmask 255.0.0.0

# Set the eth1 and eth2 IP address:
ifconfig eth1 10.0.0.4 netmask 255.0.0.0

ifconfig eth2 10.0.0.5 netmask 255.0.0.0

Now both computers are on the same LAN and can ping each other, the bridge interface, and also ping with the server NICs. It's like no switch I have ever seen.

Based On: http://openmaniak.com/openvpn_bridging.php

Extending Net-SNMP (Postfix Example)

This article is a great example that you can make anything to be monitored via SNMP. In this case Postfix, mas this applies to just about anything

Check it out on: http://thunder.jbdesign.net/docs/postfix-zenoss.html

Clone or Copy a VirtualBox Virtual Disk

Clone or Copy a VirtualBox Virtual Disk

Published by Nick Heppleston on Wednesday, 17th June 2009 in VirtualBox and Virtualisation. 7 Comments

As a virtual machine environment user, I regularly create ‘base’ images of machines that I can reuse – a base Windows Server 2003 environment, or SQL Server 2005 environment for example. That way, when I need a new machine, I can simply create a copy of the virtual disk and add any additional software I need, saving myself valuable time creating new virtual environments.

With VMWare’s various offerings, copying a virtual disk is easy: copy the disk in Windows Explorer and add it to a newly created VM; VMWare will detect that the disk was a copy and create a new unique identifier (UUID) for the disk before adding it to the VM. Easy and painless. Not so with VirtualBox.

With VirtualBox, copying a virtual disk is a bit of a pain. If you copy the disk in Windows Explorer and try and use it in a new VM, VirtualBox will have a hissy fit and display the error shown below. A bit of a ‘wordy’ way to say that it already knows about this disk, don’t you think?

The publicised way around this is to use the command-line VBoxManage CloneHd tool, however there is another – secret and undocumented – way to clone a disk: the setvdiuuid tool. Lets look at these two methods in detail.

Cloning a Virtual Disk – The ‘Supported’ Method

Cloning a disk is (IMHO) a clunky and Unix-y type way of creating a duplicate disk. We need to invoke the CloneHd command of the VBoxManage tool, supplying the disk to clone and the name of the new ‘cloned’ disk. In its simplest form, you would do something like this at the command-line:

cd C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox

VBoxManage clonehd "DiskToClone.vdi" "ClonedDisk.vdi"

The VBoxManage tool will chug away and clone the disk for you, creating a new UUID in the process:

The cloned disk can now be used on a new VM without incurring the ‘I already know about this disk’ error.

Copying a Disk – The ‘Unsupported’ Method

The unsupported method is to copy the disk like you copy a normal file and then set a diferent uuid

using setvdiuuid.

Setvdiuuid is an undocumented option available in VBoxManage – the setvdiuuid command. As the command help states: ‘This is a development tool and shall only be used to analyse problems. It is completely unsupported and will change in incompatible ways without warning’. Because of this, let me add a little disclaimer: I don’t accept any responsibility if you completely destroy your VM using this procedure. Having said that, it appears to work without issue, so I’m more than happy to use it myself – just make sure that you take a backup of you virtual disk before using it if necessary.

To use the tool, simply create a copy of the virtual disk’s VDI file in Windows Explorer; open the Windows command-line and issue the setvdiuuid command for the newly copied disk:

cd C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox

VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid "CopiedDisk.vdi"

The tool will create a new UUID and assign it to the disk:

The new copied disk can now be used on a new VM without incurring the ‘I already know about this disk’ error.

This was shown for windows but also works on linux, you just need to change cd C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox to the correct location on linux.

Based On: http://www.modhul.com/2009/06/17/how-to-clone-or-copy-a-virtualbox-virtual-disk/

Installing Magento - Shopping Cart

Magento HOWTO


# Install Apache With It's Documentation #####

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-doc

# Start Apache (it should already be started) #####
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start


# Test Apache #####

Type on Mozilla Firefox: http://127.0.0.1/
It souhld read: It works!

Note: The message "It works!" can be found at the /var/www
directorie, which is apaches's root directory, wich is were
we will install Magento.



# Instaling MySQL and PHP necessary Dependencies #####


$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
Type in mySQL's root password in the upcoming textbox.

$ sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 libapache2-mod-perl2

$ sudo apt-get install php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-imap php5-ldap

$ sudo apt-get install php5-mhash php5-mysql php5-odbc curl libwww-perl imagemagick

$ apt-get install php5-mcrypt

# Creating Magento MySQL Database #####

$ mysql -u root -p

mysql> create database magento;

mysql> exit



# Extract Magento #####

$ cd /home/user/Desktop/magento

$ unzip magento.zip



# Installing Magento in Apache #####

# Copiar o Magento para /var/www (apache root dir)
$ sudo cp -vr magento /var/www



# Give Apache Ownership Over SugarCRM Files (apache-user: www-data) #####

$ sudo chown www-data -vR /var/www/magento*



# Configuring php.ini #####

sudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini


;memory_limit = 16M
memory_limit = 64M


# Restart Apache #####

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart



# Delete Apache's Test Page #####

$ sudo rm -rf /var/www/index.html


# Configuring Magento #####

Type on Mozilla Firefox:
http://127.0.0.1/magento/install.php
and configure Magento acording to the presented instructions.



Other Shopping Carts Reviews

http://webtecker.com/2008/04/22/8-best-open-source-shopping-cart-solutions/
http://www.siteground.com/shopping_cart_reviews.htm

Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part IV

• Index
• Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part I
• Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part II
• Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part III
• Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part IV

Paranoid Penguin - Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part IV

August 1st, 2009 by Mick Bauer in

• Security

Add squidGuard's blacklist functionality to your Squid proxy.

In my previous three columns [April, May and July 2009], I described the concept, benefits and architectural considerations of outbound Web proxies (Part I); discussed basic Squid installation, configuration and operation (Part II); and explained Squid Access Control Lists (ACLs), its ability to run as an unprivileged user and provided some pointers on running Squid in a chroot jail (Part III).

Although by no means exhaustively detailed, those articles nonetheless cover the bulk of Squid's built-in security functionality (ACLs, running nonroot and possibly running chrooted). This month, I conclude this series by covering an important Squid add-on: squidGuard.

squidGuard lets you selectively enforce “blacklists” of Internet domains and URLs you don't want end users to be able to reach. Typically, people use squidGuard with third-party blacklists from various free and commercial sites, so that's the usage scenario I describe in this article.

Introduction to squidGuard
Put simply, squidGuard is a domain and URL filter. It filters domains and URLs mostly by comparing them against lists (flat files), but also, optionally, by comparing them against regular expressions.

squidGuard does not filter the actual contents of Web sites. This is the domain of appliance-based commercial Web proxies such as Blue Coat, and even products like that tend to emphasize URL/domain filtering over actual content parsing due to the high-computing (performance) cost involved.

You may wonder, what have URL and domain filtering got to do with security? Isn't that actually a form of censorship and bandwidth-use policing? On the one hand, yes, to some extent, it is.

Early in my former career as a firewall engineer and administrator, I rankled at management's expectation that I maintain lists of the most popular URLs and domains visited. I didn't think it was my business what people used their computers for, but rather it should be the job of their immediate supervisors to know what their own employees were doing.

But the fact is, organizations have the right to manage their bandwidth and other computing resources as they see fit (provided they're honest with their members/employees about privacy expectations), and security professionals are frequently in the best “position” to know what's going on. Firewalls and Web proxies typically comprise the most convenient “choke points” for monitoring or filtering Web traffic.

Furthermore, the bigger domain/URL blacklists frequently include categories for malware, phishing and other Web site categories that do, in fact, have direct security ramifications. For example, the free Shalla's Blacklists include more than 27,600 known sources of spyware!

Even if you don't care about conserving bandwidth or enforcing acceptable-use policies, there's still value in configuring squidGuard to block access to “known dangerous” Web sites. That's precisely what I'm going to show you how to do.

Getting and Installing squidGuard
If you run a recent version of Fedora, SUSE, Debian or Ubuntu Linux, squidGuard is available as a binary package from your OS's usual software mirrors (in the case of Ubuntu, it's in the universe repositories). If you run RHEL or CentOS, however, you need to install either Dag Wieers' RPM of squidGuard version 1.2, Excalibur Partners' RPM of squidGuard version 1.4, or you'll have to compile squidGuard from the latest source code, available at the squidGuard home page (see Resources for the appropriate links).

Speaking of squidGuard versions, the latest stable version of squidGuard at the time of this writing is squidGuard 1.4. But, if your Linux distribution of choice provides only squidGuard 1.2, as is the case with Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 9.04, or as with OpenSUSE 11.1, which has squidGuard 1.3, don't worry. Your distribution almost certainly has back-ported any applicable squidGuard 1.4 security patches, and from a functionality standpoint, the most compelling feature in 1.4 absent in earlier versions is support for MySQL authentication.

Hoping you'll forgive my Ubuntu bias of late, the command to install squidGuard on Ubuntu systems is simply:

bash-$ sudo apt-get squidguard
As noted above, squidGuard is in the universe repository, so you'll either need to uncomment the universe lines in /etc/apt/sources.list, or open Ubuntu's Software Sources applet, and assuming it isn't already checked, check the box next to Community-maintained Open Source software (universe), which will uncomment those lines for you.

Besides using apt-get from a command prompt to install squidGuard, you could instead use the Synaptic package manager. Either of these three approaches automatically results in your system's downloading and installing a deb archive of squidGuard.

If you need a more-current version of squidGuard than what your distribution provides and are willing to take it upon yourself to keep it patched for emerging security bugs, the squidGuard home page has complete instructions.

Getting and Installing Blacklists
Once you've obtained and installed squidGuard, you need a set of blacklists. There's a decent list of links to these at squidguard.org/blacklists.html, and of these, I think you could do far worse than Shalla's Blacklists (see Resources), a free-for-noncommercial-use set that includes more than 1.6 million entries organized into 65 categories. It's also free for commercial use; you just have to register and promise to provide feedback and list updates. Shalla's Blacklists are the set I use for the configuration examples through the rest of this article.

Once you've got a blacklist archive, unpack it. It doesn't necessarily matter where, so long as the entire directory hierarchy is owned by the same user and group under which Squid runs (proxy:proxy on Ubuntu systems). A common default location for blacklists is /var/lib/squidguard/db.

To extract Shalla's Blacklists to that directory, I move the archive file there:

bash-$ cp mv shallalist.tar.gz /var/lib/squidguard/db
Then, I unpack it like this:

bash-$ sudo -s
bash-# cd /var/lib/squidguard/db
bash-# tar --strip 1 -xvzf shallalist.tar.gz
bash-# rm shallalist.tar.tz

In the above tar command, the --strip 2 option strips the leading BL/ from the paths of everything extracted from the shallalist tar archive. Without this option, there would be an additional directory (BL/) under /var/lib/squidguard/db containing the blacklist categories, for example, /var/lib/squidguard/db/BL/realestate rather than /var/lib/squidguard/db/realestate. Note that you definitely want to delete the shallalist.tar.gz file as shown above; otherwise, squidGuard will include it in the database into which the contents of /var/lib/squidguard/db will later be imported.

Note also that at this point you're still in a root shell; you need to stay there for just a few more commands. To set appropriate ownership and permissions for your blacklists, use these commands:

bash-# chown -R proxy:proxy /var/lib/squidguard/db/
bash-# find /var/lib/squidguard/db -type f | xargs chmod 644
bash-# find /var/lib/squidguard/db -type d | xargs chmod 755
bash-# exit

And with that, your blacklists are ready for squidGuard to start blocking. After, that is, you configure squidGuard to do so.

Configuring squidGuard
On Ubuntu and OpenSUSE systems (and probably others), squidGuard's configuration file squidGuard.conf is kept in /etc/squid/, and squidGuard automatically looks there when it starts. As root, use the text editor of your choice to open /etc/squid/squidGuard.conf. If using a command-line editor like vi on Ubuntu systems, don't forget to use sudo, as with practically everything else under /etc/, you need to have superuser privileges to change squidGuard.conf.

squidGuard.conf's basic structure is:

Options (mostly paths)

Time Rules

Rewrite Rules

Source Addresses

Destination Classes

Access Control Lists

In this article, my goal is quite modest: to help you get started with a simple blacklist that applies to all users, regardless of time of day, and without any fancier URL-rewriting than redirecting all blocked transactions to the same page. Accordingly, let's focus on examples of Options, Destination Classes and ACLs. Before you change squidGuard.conf, it's a good idea to make a backup copy, like this:

bash-$ sudo cp /etc/squid/squidGuard.conf

/etc/squid/squidGuard.conf.def

Now you can edit squidGuard.conf. First, at the top, leave what are probably the default values of dbhome and logdir, which specify the paths of squidGuard's databases of blacklists (or whitelists—you also can write ACLs that explicitly allow access to certain sites and domains) and its log files, respectively. These are the defaults in Ubuntu:

dbhome /var/lib/squidguard/db
logdir /var/log/squid

These paths are easy enough to understand, especially considering that you just extracted Shalla's Blacklists to /var/lib/squidguard/db. Whatever you do, do not leave a completely blank line at the very top of the file; doing so prevents squidGuard from starting properly.

Next, you need to create a Destination Class. This being a security column, let's focus on blocking access to sites in the spyware and remotecontrol categories. You certainly don't want your users' systems to become infected with spyware, and you probably don't want users to grant outsiders remote control of their systems either.

Destination Classes that describe these two categories from Shalla's Blacklists look like this:

dest remotecontrol {
domainlist remotecontrol/domains
urllist remotecontrol/urls
}

dest spyware {
domainlist spyware/domains
urllist spyware/urls
}

As you can see, the paths in each domainlist and urllist statement are relative to the top-level database path you specified with the dbhome option. Note also the curly bracket {} placement: left brackets always immediately follow the destination name, on the same line, and right brackets always occupy their own line at the end of the class definition.

Finally, you need an ACL that references these destinations—specifically, one that blocks access to them. The ACL syntax in squidGuard is actually quite flexible, and it's easy to write both “allow all except...” and “block all except...” ACLs. Like most ACL languages, they're parsed left to right, top to bottom. Once a given transaction matches any element in an ACL, it's either blocked or passed as specified, and not matched against subsequent elements or ACLs.

You can have multiple ACL definitions in your squidGuard.conf file, but in this example scenario, it will suffice to edit the default ACL. A simple default ACL that passes all traffic unless destined for sites in the remotecontrol or spyware blacklists would look like this:

acl {
default {
pass !remotecontrol !spyware all
redirect http://www.google.com
}
}

In this example, default is the name of the ACL. Your default squidGuard.conf file probably already has an ACL definition named default, so be sure either to edit that one or delete it before entering the above definition; you can't have two different ACLs both named default.

The pass statement says that things matching remotecontrol (as defined in the prior Destination Class of that name) do not get passed, nor does spyware, but all (a wild card that matches anything that makes it that far in the pass statement) does. In other words, if a given destination matches anything in the remotecontrol or spyware blacklists (either by domain or URL), it won't be passed, but rather will be redirected per the subsequent redirect statement, which points to the Google home page.

Just to make sure you understand how this works, let me point out that if the wild card all occurred before !remotecontrol, as in “pass all !remotecontrol !spyware”, squidGuard would not block anything, because matched transactions aren't compared against any elements that follow the element they matched. When constructing ACLs, remember that order matters!

I freely admit I'm being very lazy in specifying that as my redirect page. More professional system administrators would want to put a customized “You've been redirected here because...” message onto a Web server under their control and list that URL instead. Alternatively, squidGuard comes with a handy CGI script that displays pertinent transaction data back to the user. On Ubuntu systems, the script's full path is /usr/share/doc/squidguard/examples/squidGuard.cgi.gz.

This brings me to my only complaint about squidGuard: if you want to display a custom message to redirected clients, you either need to run Apache on your Squid server and specify an http://localhost/ URL, or specify a URL pointing to some other Web server you control. This is in contrast to Squid itself, which has no problem displaying its own custom messages to clients without requiring a dedicated HTTP dæmon (either local or external).

To review, your complete sample squidGuard.conf file (not counting any commented-out lines from the default file) should look like this:

dbhome /var/lib/squidguard/db
logdir /var/log/squid

dest remotecontrol {
domainlist remotecontrol/domains
urllist remotecontrol/urls
}

dest spyware {
domainlist spyware/domains
urllist spyware/urls
}

acl {
default {
pass !remotecontrol !spyware all
redirect http://www.google.com
}
}

Now that squidGuard is configured and, among other things, knows where to look for its databases, you need to create actual database files for the files and directories under /var/lib/squidGuard/db, using this command:

bash-$ sudo -u proxy squidGuard -C all

This imports all files specified in active Destination Class definitions in squidGuard.conf, specifically in this example, the files remotecontrol/domains, remotecontrol/urls, spyware/domains and spyware/urls, into Berkeley DB-format databases. Obviously, squidGuard can access the blacklists much faster using database files than by parsing flat text files.

Configuring Squid to Use squidGuard
The last thing you need to do is reconfigure Squid to use squidGuard as a redirector and tell it how many redirector processes to keep running. The location of your squidGuard binary is highly distribution-specific; to be sure, you can find it like this:

bash-$ which squidGuard
/usr/bin/squidGuard

As for the number of redirector processes, you want a good balance of system resource usage and squidGuard performance. Starting a lot of redirectors consumes resources but maximizes squidGuard performance, whereas starting only a couple conserves resources by sacrificing squidGuard performance. Ubuntu's default of 5 is a reasonable middle ground.

The squid.conf parameters for both of these settings (redirector location and number of processes) are different depending on with which version of Squid you're using squidGuard. For Squid versions 2.5 and earlier, they're redirect_program and redirect_children. For Squid versions 2.6 and later, they're url_rewrite_program and url_rewrite_program.

For example, on my Ubuntu 9.04 system, which runs Squid version 2.7, I used a text editor (run via sudo) to add the following two lines to /etc/squid/squid.conf:

url_rewrite_program /usr/bin/squidGuard
url_rewrite_children 5

As with any other time you edit /etc/squid/squid.conf, it's probably a good idea to add custom configuration lines before or after their corresponding comment blocks. squid.conf, you may recall, is essentially self-documented—it contains many lines of example settings and descriptions of them, all in the form of comments (lines beginning with #). Keeping your customizations near their corresponding examples/defaults/comments both minimizes the chance you'll define the same parameter in two different places, and, of course, it gives you easy access to information about the things you're changing.

By the way, I'm assuming Squid itself already is installed, configured and working the way you want it to (beyond blacklisting). If you haven't gotten that far before installing squidGuard, please refer to my previous three columns (see Resources).

Before those changes take effect, you need to restart Squid. On most Linux systems, you can use this command (omitting the sudo if you're already in a root shell):

bash-$ /etc/init.d/squid reload

If you get no error messages, and if when you do a ps -axuw |grep squid you see not only a couple Squid processes, but also five squidGuard processes, then congratulations! You've now got a working installation of squidGuard.

But is it actually doing what you want it to do? Given the filters we just put in place, the quickest way to tell is, on some client configured to use your Squid proxy, to point a browser to http://www.gotomypc.com (a site in the remotecontrol blacklist). If everything's working correctly, your browser will not pull up gotomypc, but rather Google. squidGuard is passive-aggressively encouraging you to surf to a safer site!

Conclusion
squidGuard isn't the only Squid add-on of interest to the security-conscious. squidtaild and squidview, for example, are two different programs for monitoring and creating reports from Squid logs (both of them are available in Ubuntu's universe repository). I leave it to you though to take your Squid server to the next level.

This concludes my introductory series on building a secure Web proxy with Squid. I hope you're off to a good, safe start!

Resources

squidGuard home page, featuring squidGuard's latest source code and definitive documentation: squidguard.org.

OpenSUSE's squidGuard page: en.opensuse.org/SquidGuard.

squidGuard 1.2 RPMs for Fedora, CentOS and RHEL from Dag Wieers: dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/squidguard.

squidGuard 1.4 RPM for CentOS 5, from Excalibur Partners LLC: www.excaliburtech.net/archives/46.

The Debian Wiki's “Rudimentary squidGuard Filtering” page: wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SquidGuard.

Wessels, Duane: Squid: The Definitive Guide. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2004 (includes some tips on creating and using a Squid chroot jail).

The Squid home page, where you can obtain the latest source code and binaries for Squid: www.squid-cache.org.

The Ubuntu Server Guide's Squid chapter: https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/serverguide/C/squid.html.

The Squid User's Guide: www.deckle.co.za/squid-users-guide/Main_Page.

Shalla's Blacklists are available at www.shallalist.de (the most current blacklist archive is always at www.shallalist.de/Downloads/shallalist.tar.gz).

“Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part I” by Mick Bauer, LJ, April 2009: www.linuxjournal.com/article/10407.

“Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part II” by Mick Bauer, LJ, May 2009: www.linuxjournal.com/article/10433.

“Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part III” by Mick Bauer, LJ, July 2009: www.linuxjournal.com/article/10488.

Mick Bauer (darth.elmo@wiremonkeys.org) is Network Security Architect for one of the US's largest banks. He is the author of the O'Reilly book Linux Server Security, 2nd edition (formerly called Building Secure Servers With Linux), an occasional presenter at information security conferences and composer of the “Network Engineering Polka”.

Taken From: Linux Journal Issue #184/August 2009

Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part III

• Index
• Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part I
• Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part II
• Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part III
• Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part IV

Paranoid Penguin - Building a Secure Squid Web Proxy, Part III

July 1st, 2009 by Mick Bauer in

• Security

We've been building a secure Squid Web Proxy the past few months, and we'll continue to do so for a couple more. Last time [May 2009], we got Squid installed, running and restricted to serve only local clients (based on their IP addresses). This month, we delve deeper into Squid's Access Control List (ACL) capabilities and other built-in security features.

ACL Review
As you may recall from my last column, all we had to do to get Squid running on a standard Ubuntu 8.04 system was add two lines to the file /etc/squid/squid.conf:

acl mick_network src 10.0.2.0/24
http_access allow mick_network

We inserted those two lines, which allow outbound proxy connections from clients whose IP addresses fall within the network 10.0.2.0/24 (that is, addresses 10.0.2.1 through 10.0.2.254), right above Squid's default “deny all” ACL, which looks like this:

http_access deny all

You can correctly infer from this that, by default, Squid denies proxy connections from all clients. This is a refreshing change in default server application configurations during the past few years. Whereas in the past, many applications had default configurations that would “just work”, which is a very user-friendly but also excessively open stance, nowadays few network applications will do much of anything without some administrative intervention. This is only sensible. Connecting things to the Internet that you don't even know how to configure is the way of pain.

Getting back to our example ACL, the acl statement itself is fairly self-explanatory: acl tells Squid we're defining an ACL; mick_network is its name; src indicates it matches the client's source IP address or network address; and 10.0.2.0/24 is the network address in CIDR notation that will match this ACL.

This is the simplest type of ACL and still one of the most useful. In February 2002, if the New York Times had had a simple source-IP/network ACL correctly configured on its Internet-facing corporate Web proxies, the rogue hacker Adrian Lamos couldn't have gained access quite so easily to its editorial-page contributor database or its Lexus-Nexus portal.

ACLs in More Depth
Besides clients' (source) IP addresses, Squid also can match a great deal of other proxy transaction characteristics. Note that some of these deal with arcane HTTP headers and parameters, many of which are minimally useful for most Squid users anyhow.

Table 1. Complete List of ACL Types Supported in Squid 2.6

ACL Type	Description
src	Client (transaction source) IP address or network address.
dst	Server (transaction destination) IP address or network address.
myip	Local IP address on which Squid is listening for connections.
arp	Client's Ethernet (MAC) address (matches local LAN clients only).
srcdomain	Client's domain name as determined by reverse DNS lookup.
dstdomain	Domain portion of URL requested by client.
srcdom_regex	Regular expression matching client's domain name.
dstdom_regex	Regular expression matching domain in requested URL.
time	Period of time in which transaction falls.
url_regex	Regular expression matching entire requested URL (not just domain).
urlpath_regex	Regular expression matching path portion of requested URL.
urllogin	Regular expression matching requested URL's “login” field.
port	Requested site's (destination) TCP port.
myport	Local TCP port on which Squid is listening for connections.
proto	Application-layer protocol of request (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, WHOIS or GOPHER).
method	Request's HTTP method (GET, POST or CONNECT).
browser	Matches the client's browser, per HTTP “User-Agent” header.
referer_regex	Regular expression matching the unreliable HTTP “Referer” header (that is, the supposed URL of some page on which the user clicked a link to the requested site).
ident	Matches specified user name(s) of user(s) running client browser, per an “ident” lookup. Note that ident replies, which often can be spoofed, should not be used in lieu of proper authentication.
ident_regex	Regular expression defining which client user names to match per ident lookup.
src_as	Matches client IP addresses associated with the specified Autonomous System (AS) number, usually an ISP or other large IP registrant.
dst_as	Matches destination-server IP addresses associated with the specified AS number.
proxy_auth	Matches the specified user name, list of user names or the wild card REQUIRED (which signifies any valid user name).
proxy_auth_regex	Regular expression defining which user names to match.
snmp_community	For SNMP-enabled Squid proxies, matches client-provided SNMP community string.
maxconn	Matches when client's IP address has established more than the specified number of HTTP connections.
max_user_ip	Matches the number of IP addresses from which a single user attempts to log in.
req_mime_type	Matches a regular expression describing the MIME type of the client's request (not the server's response).
req_header	Matches a regular expression applied to all known request headers (browser, referer and mime-type) in the client's request.
rep_mime_type	Matches a regular expression describing the MIME type of the server's response.
rep_header	Matches a regular expression applied to all known request headers (browser, referer and mime-type) in the server's response.
external	Performs an external ACL lookup by querying the specified helper class defined in the external_acl_type tag.
urlgroup	Matches a urlgroup name, as defined in redirector setups.
user_cert	Matches specified attribute (DN, C, O, CN, L or ST) and values against client's SSL certificate.
ca_cert	Matches specified attribute (DN, C, O, CN, L or ST) and values against client certificate's issuing Certificate Authority certificate.
ext_user	Matches specified user name(s) against that returned by an external ACL/authentication helper (configured elsewhere in squid.conf).
ext_user_regex	Matches a regular expression describing user names to be matched against that returned by an external ACL/authentication helper.

I've presented the full range of possible ACL types to give you a taste for how rich Squid's ACL functionality is. Needless to say, however, I can't cover usage scenarios for (or even adequately explain) all of these. ViServe's “Squid 2.6 Configuration Manual” (see Resources) gives complete syntax and usage examples for all.

Many, if not most, Squid installations don't go much beyond a few src ACLs, along with perhaps a few simple dstdomain blacklist entries thrown in for good measure. Many of the other most useful ACL types, such as myip, time, port, proto, method, dst_mime_type and rep_mime_type, should be reasonably self-explanatory (or at least easy enough to understand from the examples shown in squid.conf's comments).

One category of less-intuitive ACL types is particularly powerful and useful: the ones that enable Squid to authenticate client users via external authentication authorities. Before we tackle authentication, however, we should give a little more attention to ACL operators, the tags that perform some action (most commonly, to allow or deny a request) based on a matched ACL.

By far, the most important ACL operator is http_access, which specifies whether Squid should allow the transaction matching the specified ACL to proceed. Going back to the example ACL/operator pair from the beginning of this section, after we defined the ACL mick_network as all transactions involving client/source IP addresses within 10.0.2.0/24, we operated on it with this line:

http_access allow mick_network
This is simple enough to understand: “allow HTTP requests matching the ACL named mick_network.”

The most common use of ACLs is to specify a list of ACLs and http_access statements, ending (as we've seen) with a “drop by default” line, like this:

http_access deny all
This has the effect of creating a “whitelist”— a list of types of transactions that are allowed, with all others being denied.

Squid recognizes a number of additional ACL operators besides http_allow, including no_cache, ident_lookup_access, always_direct, never_direct and snmp_access. Because most of these concern cache performance, HTTP redirects and communications with other Squid servers rather than security per se, I'll leave it to you to explore those (or not) as your particular needs dictate. The Squid User's Guide referenced in the Resources section is a good source of information about Squid's various ACL operators.

Squid Authentication
As I mentioned previously, one of Squid's most handy capabilities is its ability to authenticate proxy users by means of a variety of external helper mechanisms. One of the simplest and probably most commonly used helper applications is ncsa_auth, a simple user name/password scheme that uses a flat file consisting of rows of user name/password hash pairs. The HOWTO by Vivek Gite and, to a lesser extent, the Squid User's Guide, explain how to set this up (see Resources).

Briefly, you'll add something like this to /etc/squid/squid.conf:

auth_param basic program /usr/lib/squid/ncsa_auth /etc/squid/squidpasswd
auth_param basic children 5
auth_param basic realm Squid proxy-caching web server at Wiremonkeys.org
auth_param basic credentialsttl 2 hours
auth_param basic casesensitive off
And, in the ACL section:

acl ncsa_auth_users proxy_auth REQUIRED
http_access allow ncsa_auth_users
The block of auth_param tags specifies settings for a “basic” authentication mechanism:

program is the helper executable ncsa_auth, using the file /etc/squid/squidpassd as the user name/password hash list (created previously).

children, the number of concurrent authentication processes, is five.

realm, part of the string that greets users, is “Squid proxy-caching Web server at Wiremonkeys.org”.

credentialsttl, the time after authentication that a successfully authenticated client may go before being re-authenticated, is two hours.

casesensitive, which determines whether user names are case-sensitive, is off.

In the ACL section, we defined an ACL called ncsa_auth_users that says the proxy_auth mechanism (as defined in the auth_param section) should be used to authenticate specified users. Actually in this case, instead of a list of user names to authenticate, we've got the wild card REQUIRED, which expands to “all valid users”. The net effect of this ACL and its subsequent http_access statement is that only successfully authenticated users may use the proxy.

The main advantages of the NCSA mechanism are its simplicity and its reasonable amount of security (only password hashes are transmitted, not passwords proper). Its disadvantage is scalability, because it requires you to maintain a dedicated user name/password list. Besides the administrative overhead in this, it adds yet another user name/password pair your users are expected to remember and protect, which is always an exercise with diminishing returns (the greater the number of credentials users have, the less likely they'll avoid risky behaviors like writing them down, choosing easy-to-guess passwords and so forth).

Therefore, you're much better off using existing user credentials on an external LDAP server (via the ldap_auth helper) on an NT Domain or Active Directory server (via the msnt_auth helper) or the local Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) facility (via the pam_auth helper). See Resources for tutorials on how to set up Squid with these three helpers.

Note that Squid's helper programs are located conventionally under /usr/lib/squid. Checking this directory is a quick way to see which helpers are installed on your system, although some Linux distributions may use a different location.

Other Squid Defenses
Access Control Lists really are Squid's first line of defense—that is, Squid's primary mechanism for protecting your network, your users and the Squid server itself. There are a couple other things worth mentioning, however.

First, there's the matter of system privileges. Squid must run as root, at least while starting up, so that, among other things, it can bind to privileged TCP ports such as 80 or 443 (although by default it uses the nonprivileged port 3128). Like other mainstream server applications, however, Squid's child processes—the ones with which the outside world actually interacts—are run with lower privileges. This helps minimize the damage a compromised or hijacked Squid process can do.

By default, Squid uses the user proxy and group proxy for nonprivileged operations. If you want to change these values for effective UID and GID, they're controlled by squid.conf's cache_effective_user and cache_effective_group tags, respectively.

Squid usually keeps its parent process running as root, in case it needs to perform some privileged action after startup. Also, by default, Squid does not run in a chroot jail. To make Squid run chrooted, which also will cause it to kill the privileged parent process after startup (that is, also will cause it to run completely unprivileged after startup), you can set squid.conf's chroot tag to the path of a previously created Squid chroot jail.

If you're new to this concept, chrooting something (changing its root) confines it to a subset of your filesystem, with the effect that if the service is somehow hacked (for example, via some sort of buffer overflow), the attacker's processes and activities will be confined to an unprivileged “padded cell” environment. It's a useful hedge against losing the patch rat race.

Chrooting and running with nonroot privileges go hand in hand. If a process runs as root, it can trivially break out of the chroot jail. Conversely, if a nonprivileged process nonetheless has access to other (even nonprivileged) parts of your filesystem, it still may be abused in unintended and unwanted ways.

Somewhat to my surprise, there doesn't seem to be any how-to for creating a Squid chroot jail on the Internet. The world could really use one—maybe I'll tackle this myself at some point. In the meantime, see Resources for some mailing-list posts that may help. Suffice it to say for now that as with any other chroot jail, Squid's must contain not only its own working directories, but also copies of system files like /etc/nsswitch.conf and shared libraries it uses.

Common Squid practice is to forego the chroot experience and to settle for running Squid partially unprivileged per its default settings. If, however, you want to run a truly hardened Squid server, it's probably worth the effort to figure out how to build and use a Squid chroot jail.

Conclusion
Setting ACLs, running Squid with nonroot privileges most or all of the time and running Squid in a chroot jail constitute the bulk of Squid's built-in security features. But, these are not the only things you can do to use Squid to enhance your network and end-user systems' security.

Next time, I'll show you how to use add-on tools such as SquidGuard to increase Squid's intelligence in how it evaluates clients' requests and servers' replies. I'll also address (if not next time then in a subsequent column) some of the finer points of proxying TLS/SSL-encrypted sessions. Until then, be safe!

Resources

Wessels, Duane: Squid: The Definitive Guide. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2004. Includes some tips on creating and using a Squid chroot jail.

The Squid home page, where you can obtain the latest source code and binaries for Squid: www.squid-cache.org.

The Ubuntu Server Guide's Squid chapter: https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/serverguide/C/squid.html.

The Squid User's Guide: www.deckle.co.za/squid-users-guide/Main_Page.

ViSolve's Squid 2.6 Configuration Manual and Comprehensive squid.conf Reference: www.visolve.com/squid/squid26/contents.php.

“The Homeless Hacker v. The New York Times”, Jennifer Kahn's article in Wired about Adrian Lamos: www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/hacker_pr.html.

Chris Wichura's slideshow “The Squid Caching Proxy”: www.uniforum.chi.il.us/slides/squid/UniForum-Squid.ppt.

Vivek Gite's tutorial “Howto: Squid proxy authentication using ncsa_auth helper”: www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-unix-squid-proxy-server-authentication.html.

Vivek Gite's Tutorial “Configure squid for LDAP authentication using squid_ldap_auth helper”: www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-configure-squid-ldap-authentication.html.

David Bolton's “Howto: Squid + msnt_auth + Active Directory”: www.davidbolton.com/?p=32.

Paul Matthews' HOWTO “Squid with PAM Authentication and Squish Download Manager”: www.opensourcehowto.org/how-to/squid/squid-with-pam-authentication--squish-download-manager.html.

Thread from the squid-users mailing list, on what should go into a Squid chroot jail: www.squid-cache.org/mail-archive/squid-users/200609/0782.html.

Thread from the squid-users mailing list, about some of the finer points of running Squid in a chroot jail: www.squid-cache.org/mail-archive/squid-users/200811/0411.html.

Mick Bauer (darth.elmo@wiremonkeys.org) is Network Security Architect for one of the US's largest banks. He is the author of the O'Reilly book Linux Server Security, 2nd edition (formerly called Building Secure Servers With Linux), an occasional presenter at information security conferences and composer of the “Network Engineering Polka”.

Taken From: Linux Journal Contents #183, July 2009