cipherdyne.org

Michael Rash, Security Researcher



Building a Native Windows fwknop.exe Binary

Native Windows fwknop.exe Julien Picalaus recently posted a message to the fwknop mailing list in which he explains how to use Strawberry Perl (reportedly what Larry Wall uses for his perl distribution on Windows systems) along with the Perl Packager to create a native Windows binary for the fwknop client. The result is a functional fwknop.exe binary that can be used on Windows systems to gain access to services protected by an fwknopd server running on other systems with iptables or ipfw policies.

At some point, if fwknopd is modified to hook into a Windows firewalling API, then this same technique could be used create stand alone fwknopd binaries for Windows as well. This would extend Single Packet Authorization (SPA) firmly into the Windows world. In the meantime, Julien's instructions for the fwknop client are as follows:

  • Install strawberry perl.
  • Use CPAN to install Crypt::CBC and Crypt::Rijndael (required by fwknop).
  • Grab the fwknop sources and try to run perl fwknop -whatever options you need, to make sure it works. Apparently, you need to provide the --Home option since fwknop can't find home folders without it.
  • Use CPAN to install Module::ScanDeps, PAR::Dist, PAR, PAR::Packer.
  • Run pp -c -M Crypt::Rijndael -o fwknop.exe fwknop (at least this worked for me, not sure why I had to specify the Rijndael module manually).
  • You have fwknop.exe.