Certificate Transparency logs and how they are a gold mine to Bug Hunters
What is CT?
Certificate Transparency (CT) is an experimental IETF standard. The goal of CT is to allow the public to audit which certificates were created by Certificate Authorities (CA). TLS has a weakness that comes from the large list of CAs that your browser implicitly trusts. If any of those CAs were to maliciously create a new certificate for a domain, your browser would trust it. CT adds benefits to TLS certificate trust: Companies can monitor who is creating certificates for the domains they own. It also allows browsers to verify that the certificate for a given domain is in the public log record.
How can CT logs benefit Red Teams, Pentesters, and Bug Bounty Hunters?
These logs end up being a gold mine of information for penetration testers and Red Teams. I’m not the first to use this, people have been using this technique for years to gain OSINT on targets. When you start to experiment with searching on some of the web based CT log web sites, you’ll quickly realized this is an information leak by design.
After copying and pasting from the search results, I knew this wasn’t going to scale. Some companies have thousands of domains that show up, so I knew I needed to automate this. I also noticed that some domains either didn’t resolve or were only accessible from the inside networks (internal IP space, or DNS ‘view’ for BIND server prevented a resposne).
It goes without saying that these logs can help you find more targets, that might not have seen many eyes. Making it easier to get a bug bounty award. In my experience CT logs provide more sub domains than a google dork with site:domain.com.
ct-exposer
Instead of googling to see if a tool existed to search CT logs for unknown subdomains, I decided to make my own. In addition to querying and creating a sub domain list, I also wanted to do DNS queries on the domains to see which ones had records configured. When companies have one or two thousand subdomains in CT logs, it can take a little while to resolve them one at a time. To speed this up I used gevents, which sped things up nicely. I’ve seen 2k resolutions get processed in about a second or two. I added the ability to export the ip addresses into a masscan input format to help automate tasks that take place after you’ve located IPs to investigate.
Interesting things I’ve learned during this project
Symantec’s CT log searching tool has a bug. If you search for a domain with it, and then hit their ‘export as csv’ endpoint, it will not give the correct response. The csv will be filled with spam domains that do not include the domain you’re looking for, but with hits that look like: domain-requested.com.something.spammer.net. This I guess would be useful for companies who want to track down phishing sites, but was unhelpful for anyone else. The web page table did have the correct information though, but that is a pain to scrape. It was also very slow to reply with search results.
While doing testing of the gevents portion of my code, I noticed that responses from my DNS servers would come back in batches of 36 or 50. It would pause a couple of seconds, before the next similarly sized responses came in. At first I thought it was my code, and then I looked into linux being the problem, but then after trying on another network the resolution of 1000 domains would complete in a second or two. It seems my ISP is rate limiting DNS traffic.
I also noticed that a lot of companies have leaked domains that can only be accessed on their internal networks. Sometimes I even saw internal only 192.168.0.0 addresses coming back. This can be very helpful for internal server side request forgery (SSRF) targets, or pivoting once you get inside of the network.
GitHub
I’ve posted ct-exposer on my GitHub. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contact me.
Example output
python3 ct-exposer.py -d teslamotors.com
[+]: Downloading domain list...
[+]: Download of domain list complete.
[+]: Parsed 76 domain(s) from list.
[+]: Domains found:
205.234.27.243 adfs.teslamotors.com
104.92.115.166 akamaisecure.qualtrics.com
211.147.80.202 cn.auth.teslamotors.com
211.147.88.104 cnvpn.teslamotors.com
209.10.208.24 energystorage.teslamotors.com
209.11.133.110 epc.teslamotors.com
149.14.82.93 euvpn.teslamotors.com
209.11.133.50 extconfl.teslamotors.com
209.11.133.35 extissues.teslamotors.com
209.10.208.31 fleetview.teslamotors.com
64.125.183.134 leaseapp.teslamotors.com
64.125.183.134 leaseappde.teslamotors.com
209.11.133.11 lync.teslamotors.com
211.147.80.201 mycn-origin.teslamotors.com
205.234.27.211 origin-www45.teslamotors.com
205.234.31.120 owner-api.teslamotors.com
12.201.132.70 plcvpn.teslamotors.com
205.234.27.246 quickbase.teslamotors.com
104.86.205.249 resources.teslamotors.com
209.10.208.55 sdlcvpn.teslamotors.com
209.11.133.37 service.teslamotors.com
205.234.27.226 sftp.teslamotors.com
23.227.38.64 shop.eu.teslamotors.com
209.133.79.61 shop.teslamotors.com
23.227.38.64 shop.uk.teslamotors.com
205.234.27.197 smswsproxy.teslamotors.com
209.11.133.36 supercharger.teslamotors.com
209.133.79.59 suppliers.teslamotors.com
209.133.79.61 tesla.com
209.11.133.106 teslamotors.com
205.234.27.200 teslaplm-external.teslamotors.com
209.11.133.107 toolbox.teslamotors.com
209.10.208.20 trt.teslamotors.com
205.234.27.250 upload.teslamotors.com
209.10.208.27 us.auth.teslamotors.com
205.234.27.218 vpn.teslamotors.com
211.147.80.205 wechat.teslamotors.com
205.234.27.212 wsproxy.teslamotors.com
209.133.79.54 www-origin.teslamotors.com
104.86.216.34 www.teslamotors.com
209.11.133.61 xmail.teslamotors.com
211.147.80.203 xmailcn.teslamotors.com
[+]: Domains with no DNS record:
none cdn02.c3edge.net
none creditauction.teslamotors.com
none evprd.teslamotors.com
none imail.teslamotors.com
none jupytersvn.teslamotors.com
none leadgen.teslamotors.com
none lockit.teslamotors.com
none lockpay.teslamotors.com
none neovi-vpn.teslamotors.com
none origin-wte.teslamotors.com
none referral.teslamotors.com
none resources.tesla.com
none securemail.teslamotors.com
none shop.ca.teslamotors.com
none shop.no.teslamotors.com
none sip.teslamotors.com
none sjc04p2staap04.teslamotors.com
none sling.teslamotors.com
none tesla3dx.teslamotors.com
none testimail.teslamotors.com
none toolbox-energy.teslamotors.com
none vpn-node0.teslamotors.com
none wd.s3.teslamotors.com
none www-uat2.teslamotors.com
none www45.teslamotors.com