TIP: WatchGuard has
[responded](https://web.archive.org/web/20230326041952/https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/5tg0f9/reverseengineering_watchguard_mobile_vpn/dds6knx/)
to this post on Reddit. If you haven\'t read the post yet I\'d recommend
doing that first before reading the response to have the proper context.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of my current clients makes use of
[WatchGuard](http://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/fireware/11/en-US/Content/en-US/mvpn/ssl/mvpn_ssl_client-install_c.html)
Mobile VPN software to provide access to the internal network.

Currently WatchGuard only provides clients for OS X and Windows, neither
of which I am very fond of. In addition an OpenVPN configuration file is
provided, but it quickly turned out that this was only a piece of the
puzzle.

The problem is that this VPN setup is secured using 2-factor
authentication (good!), but it does not use OpenVPN's default
[challenge/response](https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/miscellaneous/79-management-interface.html)
functionality to negotiate the credentials.

Connecting with the OpenVPN config that the website supplied caused the
VPN server to send me a token to my phone, but I simply couldn't figure
out how to supply it back to the server. In a normal challenge/response
setting the token would be supplied as the password on the second
authentication round, but the VPN server kept rejecting that.

Other possibilities were various combinations of username&password
(I've seen a lot of those around) so I tried a whole bunch, for example
`$password:$token` or even a `sha1(password, token)` - to no avail.

At this point it was time to crank out
[Hopper](https://www.hopperapp.com/) and see what's actually going on
in the official OS X client - which uses OpenVPN under the hood!

Diving into the client
----------------------

The first surprise came up right after opening the executable: It had
debug symbols in it - and was written in Objective-C!

![Debug symbols](/static/img/watchblob_1.webp)

A good first step when looking at an application binary is going through
the strings that are included in it, and the WatchGuard client had a lot
to offer. Among the most interesting were a bunch of URIs that looked
important:

![Some URIs](/static/img/watchblob_2.webp)

I started with the first one

    %@?action=sslvpn_download&filename=%@&fw_password=%@&fw_username=%@

and just curled it on the VPN host, replacing the username and
password fields with bogus data and the filename field with
`client.wgssl` - another string in the executable that looked like a
filename.

To my surprise this endpoint immediately responded with a GZIPed file
containing the OpenVPN config, CA certificate, and the client
*certificate and key*, which I previously thought was only accessible
after logging in to the web UI - oh well.

The next endpoint I tried ended up being a bit more interesting still:

    /?action=sslvpn_logon&fw_username=%@&fw_password=%@&style=fw_logon_progress.xsl&fw_logon_type=logon&fw_domain=Firebox-DB

Inserting the correct username and password into the query parameters
actually triggered the process that sent a token to my phone. The
response was a simple XML blob:

```xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<resp>
  <action>sslvpn_logon</action>
  <logon_status>4</logon_status>
  <auth-domain-list>
    <auth-domain>
      <name>RADIUS</name>
    </auth-domain>
  </auth-domain-list>
  <logon_id>441</logon_id>
  <chaStr>Enter Your 6 Digit Passcode </chaStr>
</resp>
```

Somewhat unsurprisingly that `chaStr` field is actually the challenge
string displayed in the client when logging in.

This was obviously going in the right direction so I proceeded to the
procedures making use of this string. The first step was a relatively
uninteresting function called `-[VPNController sslvpnLogon]` which
formatted the URL, opened it and checked whether the `logon_status` was
`4` before proceeding with the `logon_id` and `chaStr` contained in the
response.

*(Code snippets from here on are Hopper's pseudo-Objective-C)*

![sslvpnLogon](/static/img/watchblob_3.webp)

It proceeded to the function `-[VPNController processTokenPrompt]` which
showed the dialog window into which the user enters the token, sent it
off to the next URL and checked the `logon_status` again:

(`r12` is the reference to the `VPNController` instance, i.e. `self`).

![processTokenPrompt](/static/img/watchblob_4.webp)

If the `logon_status` was `1` (apparently \"success\" here) it proceeded
to do something quite interesting:

![processTokenPrompt2](/static/img/watchblob_5.webp)

The user's password was overwritten with the (verified) OTP token -
before OpenVPN had even been started!

Reading a bit more of the code in the subsequent
`-[VPNController doLogin]` method revealed that it shelled out to
`openvpn` and enabled the management socket, which makes it possible to
remotely control an `openvpn` process by sending it commands over TCP.

It then simply sent the username and the OTP token as the credentials
after configuring OpenVPN with the correct config file:

![doLogin](/static/img/watchblob_6.webp)

... and the OpenVPN connection then succeeds.

TL;DR
-----

Rather than using OpenVPN's built-in challenge/response mechanism, the
WatchGuard client validates user credentials *outside* of the VPN
connection protocol and then passes on the OTP token, which seems to be
temporarily in a 'blessed' state after verification, as the user's
password.

I didn't check to see how much verification of this token is performed
(does it check the source IP against the IP that performed the challenge
validation?), but this certainly seems like a bit of a security issue -
considering that an attacker on the same network would, if they time the
attack right, only need your username and 6-digit OTP token to
authenticate.

Don't roll your own security, folks!

Bonus
-----

The whole reason why I set out to do this is so I could connect to this
VPN from Linux, so this blog post wouldn't be complete without a
solution for that.

To make this process really easy I've written a [little
tool](https://github.com/tazjin/watchblob) that performs the steps
mentioned above from the CLI and lets users know when they can
authenticate using their OTP token.
