TL;DR Active Directory Certificate Services has a lot of attack potential! Check out our whitepaper “Certified Pre-Owned: Abusing Active Directory Certificate Services” for complete details. We’re also presenting this material at Black Hat USA 2021. [EDIT 06/22/21] — We’ve updated some of the details for ESC1 and ESC2 in this post which...

Last month, Elad Shamir released a phenomenal, in depth post on abusing resource-based constrained delegation (RBCD) in Active Directory. One of the big points he discusses is that if the TrustedToAuthForDelegation UserAccountControl flag is not set, the S4U2self process will still work but the resulting TGS is not FORWARDABLE. This...

Rubeus is a C# Kerberos abuse toolkit that started as a port of @gentilkiwi‘s Kekeo toolset and has continued to evolve since then. For more information on Rubeus, check out the “From Kekeo to Rubeus” release post, the follow up “Rubeus – Now With More Kekeo”, or the recently revamped...

For years Microsoft has stated that the forest was the security boundary in Active Directory. For example, Microsoft’s “What Are Domains and Forests?” document (last updated in 2014) has a “Forests as Security Boundaries” section which states (emphasis added): Each forest is a single instance of the directory, the top-level...

Every time I think I start to understand Active Directory and Kerberos, a new topic pops up to mess with my head. A few weeks ago, @elad_shamir contacted @tifkin_ and myself with some ideas about resource-based Kerberos constrained delegation. Thanks to Elad’s ideas, the great back and forth, and his awesome pull...

Rubeus, my C# port of some of features from @gentilkiwi‘s Kekeo toolset, already has a few new updates in its 1.1.0 release, and another new feature in its 1.2.0 release. This post will cover the main new features as well as any miscellaneous changes, and will dive a bit into...

Kekeo, the other big project from Benjamin Delpy after Mimikatz, is an awesome code base with a set of great features. As Benjamin states, it’s external to the Mimikatz codebase because, “I hate to code network related stuff ; It uses an external commercial ASN.1 library inside.“ Kekeo provides (feature list not...

I’ve spoken about DPAPI (the Data Protection Application Programming Interface) a bit before, including how KeePass uses DPAPI for its “Windows User Account” key option. I recently dove into some of the amazing work that Benjamin Delpy has done concerning DPAPI and wanted to record some operational notes on abusing DPAPI with Mimikatz....

Anyone who has followed myself or my teammates at SpecterOps for a while knows that we’re fairly big fans of PowerShell. I’ve been involved in offensive PowerShell for about 4 years, @mattifestation was the founder of PowerSploit and various defensive projects, @jaredcatkinson has been writing defensive PowerShell for years, and...

This is the fifth post in my “PowerView PowerUsage” series, and follows the same Scenario/Solution/Explanation pattern as the previous entries. The original post contains a constantly updated list of the entire series. The Scenario You discovered on an engagement that most user workstations contain the user’s Active Directory samaccount name,...