[qubes-users] wireless " intruder "

Hello, I have a intriguing problem, partially qubes-related. I have a
"intruder" in my wifi network. I have no idea how to physically localise
that offensive antenna, but that is not a qubes subject (if you have any
ideas, they are welcome!). Of course I can just change the SSID and pwd,
but this is not the whole point:

When I portscan the offensive object using nmap (all ports are
filtered.) it counter-fires and kills off my mirage-firewall! That is
fancy. The network structure is

sys-net - mirage-firewall -qubes-firewall - dispVM

and nmap runs in dispVM. I am quite surprised and willing to "play" a
bit with this enemy, but I would need some help. In particular: How can
I log packets while scannning? Is there a way to find out how/why the
mirage firewall (0.7) dies? That suggests a weakness which is relevant
to many of us! Cheers, Bernhard

Your firewalls might interfere with the nmap replies and thus everything is shown as filtered.

Also the above network setup looks weird (why two firewalls in a chain?).

Maybe nmap causes the mirage death. That wouldn't be a good job by mirage though and should be reported as bug to the dev.

Anyway I'd recommend doing nmap directly from sys-net or from a VM that is directly connected to sys-net.

Hello, I have a intriguing problem, partially qubes-related. I have a
"intruder" in my wifi network. I have no idea how to physically localise
that offensive antenna, but that is not a qubes subject (if you have any
ideas, they are welcome!). Of course I can just change the SSID and pwd,
but this is not the whole point:

When I portscan the offensive object using nmap (all ports are
filtered.) it counter-fires and kills off my mirage-firewall! That is
fancy. The network structure is

sys-net - mirage-firewall -qubes-firewall - dispVM

and nmap runs in dispVM. I am quite surprised and willing to "play" a
bit with this enemy, but I would need some help. In particular: How can
I log packets while scannning? Is there a way to find out how/why the
mirage firewall (0.7) dies? That suggests a weakness which is relevant
to many of us! Cheers, Bernhard

Your firewalls might interfere with the nmap replies and thus everything
is shown as filtered.

I did it in sys-net but they remain "filtered". That is not a
firewall-artefact.

Maybe nmap causes the mirage death. That wouldn't be a good job by
mirage though and should be reported as bug to the dev.

I thought that, too. How would verify it is really nmap? As a test, I
scanned two phones in my wifi (in the same dispVM), without any trouble,
using the same command. I re-scanned the offensive object, 181 seconds
later mirage is dead again. Fascinating.

P.S: I will see if I can use my phone as AP honypot using the same SSID
& pwd to find that antenna using signal strength (the idea is that I can
move it), but usually that is very hard, due to natural "shadows" and
reflections.

If mirage died due to incoming packets, you should see the offensive payload with e.g. wireshark.
The attack couldn't be on a lower layer as that is handled by your wifi driver in sys-net only.

In companies triangulation tends to be used to find wifi attackers IIRC. So you're likely on the right path.

...

Maybe nmap causes the mirage death. That wouldn't be a good job by
mirage though and should be reported as bug to the dev.

I thought that, too. How would verify it is really nmap? As a test, I
scanned two phones in my wifi (in the same dispVM), without any trouble,
using the same command. I re-scanned the offensive object, 181 seconds
later mirage is dead again. Fascinating.

Are there logs (the famous "last words")?

...

(my) mirage does not log. It has a fixed size of 32 MB, not much space
for logging .. and dom0 has no useful info on that incident.

It should log to the console, which is recorded by dom0 in guest-mirage-firewall.log (you can also get to it via qubes-manager IIRC).

Most likely it ran out of memory adding NAT entries for all the ports. Is this the current release version (using mini-os and PV) or the Git version (using solo5 and PVH)? The solo5 version has some problems with memory at the moment (With solo5, firewall runs out of memory after a while and can't recover · Issue #120 · mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall · GitHub - seems to be reporting inaccurate heap stats).