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Summary

Microsoft is aware of PetitPotam which can potentially be used to attack Windows domain controllers or other Windows servers. PetitPotam is a classic NTLM Relay Attack, and such attacks have been previously documented by Microsoft along with numerous mitigation options to protect customers. For example: Microsoft Security Advisory 974926.  

To prevent NTLM Relay Attacks on networks with NTLM enabled, domain administrators must ensure that services that permit NTLM authentication make use of protections such as Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA) or signing features such as SMB signing. PetitPotam takes advantage of servers where Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) is not configured with protections for NTLM Relay Attacks. The mitigations below outline to customers how to protect their AD CS servers from such attacks.   

You are potentially vulnerable to this attack if you are using Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) with any of the following services: 

  • Certificate Authority Web Enrollment

  • Certificate Enrollment Web Service

Mitigation

If your environment is potentially affected, we recommend the following mitigations:

Primary mitigation

We recommend enabling EPA and disabling HTTP on AD CS servers. Open the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and do the following:

  1. Enable EPA for Certificate Authority Web Enrollment, Required being the more secure and recommended option:

    Certificate Authority Web Enrollment dialog

  2. Enable EPA for Certificate Enrollment Web Service, Required being the more secure and recommended option:

    Certificate Enrollment Web Service dialog

    After enabling EPA in the UI, the Web.config file created by CES role at <%windir%>\systemdata\CES\<CA Name>_CES_Kerberos\web.config should also be updated by adding <extendedProtectionPolicy> set with a value of either WhenSupported or Always depending on the Extended Protection option selected in the IIS UI above.

    Note: The Always setting is used when the UI is set to Required, which is the recommended and most secure option.

    For more information on the options available for extendedProtectionPolicy, see <transport> of <basicHttpBinding>. The most likely used settings are as follows:

    <binding name="TransportWithHeaderClientAuth">
         <security mode="Transport">
             <transport clientCredentialType="Windows">
             <extendedProtectionPolicy policyEnforcement="Always" />
             </transport>
             <message clientCredentialType="None" establishSecurityContext="false" negotiateServiceCredential="false" />
         </security>
         <readerQuotas maxStringContentLength="131072" />
    </binding>
    
  3. Enable Require SSL, which will enable only HTTPS connections.

    HTTP

Important: After completing the above steps, you will need to restart IIS to load the changes. To restart IIS, open an elevated Command Prompt window, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

iisreset /restart

Note
 This command stops all IIS services that are running and then restarts them.

Additional mitigation

In addition to the primary mitigations, we recommend you disable NTLM authentication where possible. The following mitigations are listed in order from more secure to less secure:

To do so open IIS Manager UI, set Windows authentication to Negotiate:Kerberos

View of IIS Manager UI dialog

IIS Manager UI alternative view

Important: After completing the above steps, you will need to restart IIS to load the changes. To restart IIS, open an elevated Command Prompt window, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

iisreset /restart

Note
 This command stops all IIS services that are running and then restarts them.

For more information, please see Microsoft Security Advisory ADV210003

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