In the last week at Blackhat / Defcon two groups looked deeply at one of the lesser known implementations of network policy called Proxy Autoconfig. (In particular, badWPAD by Maxim and Crippling HTTPS with unholy PAC by Safebreach.)
Proxy AutoConfig (PAC) is a mechanism used by many organizations to configure an advanced policy for connecting to the Internet. A PAC file is written in JavaScript to provide a dynamic determination of how different connections should be made, and which proxy they should use. In particular, international companies with satellite offices often find the PAC system useful in routing some traffic through a corporate proxy for compliance or geographical reasons while other traffic is routed directly to the Internet.
These two talks both focus on what a malicious individual could do to attack the standard, and each find an interesting line of attack. The first attack is that the PAC file is allowed to make DNS requests in determining how to proxy connections, and in many browsers sees the full URL being accessed rather than only the domain. This means that even when the user is communicating with a remote server over HTTPS, the local network can learn the full URL that is being visited. The second attack has to do with where computers look for PAC files on their local network – for a file called `wpad.dat`.
While there is certainly the potential for an attacker to target a victim through these technologies, they are more accessible and arguably more valuable to a ISP or state level actor interested in passive surveillance. This explicit policy for connectivity is not inherently more invasive than policies employed by many ISPs already, and could likely be deployed on many networks without consumer push-back as a performance enhancement for better caching. It is also appropriate for targeted surveillance, since vulnerability can be determined passively.
The viability of surveillance through WPAD and PACs is a bit of a mixed bag. Most ISPs use DHCP already and set a “search domain”, which will result in a recognizable request for proxy information from vulnerable clients. While organizations often require all clients to enable discovery, this is not true of many consumer machines. Unfortunately, some versions of windows have proxy discovery enabled by default.
The NMAP tool used for network exploration, and pitched towards use as a tool facilitating network attackers, already has support for WPAD. In contrast, the network status and monitoring tools, like Netalyzr and OONI do not yet monitor local proxy status and won’t provide indication of malicious behavior.