SilenTknock: Practical, provably undetectable authentication

Abstract

Port knocking is a technique first introduced in the blackhat and trade literature to prevent attackers from discovering and exploiting potentially vulnerable services on a network host, while allowing authenticated users to access these services. Despite being based on some sound principles and being a potentially useful tool, most work in this area suffers from a lack of a clear threat model or motivation. We introduce a formal security model for port knocking that addresses these issues, show how previous schemes fail to meet our definition, and give a provably secure scheme that uses steganographic embedding of pseudorandom message authentication codes. We also describe the design and analysis of SILENTKNOCK, an implementation of this protocol for the Linux 2.6 operating system, that is provably secure, under the assumption that AES and a modified version of MD4 are pseudorandom functions, and integrates seamlessly with any existing application, with no need to recompile. Experiments indicate that the overhead due to running SILENTKNOCK on a server is minimal - on the order of 150 μs per TCP connection initiation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.