Forged Certificates
Last updated
Last updated
In larger organisations, the AD CS roles are installed on separate servers and not on the domain controllers themselves. Often times, they are also not treated with the same sensitivity as DCs. So, whereas only EAs and DAs can access/manage DCs, "lower level" roles such as server admins can access the CAs. Although this can be seen a privilege escalation, it's just as useful as a domain persistence method.
Gaining local admin access to a CA allows an attacker to extract the CA private key, which can be used to sign a forged certificate (think of this like the krbtgt hash being able to sign a forged TGT). The default validity period for a CA private key is 5 years, but this can be set to any value during setup, sometimes as high as 10+ years.
Once on a CA, SharpDPAPI can extract the private keys.
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Save the private key and certificate to a .pem file and convert it to a .pfx with openssl. Then, build the forged certificate with ForgeCert.
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Even though you can specify any SubjectAltName, the user does need to be present in AD. We can now use Rubeus to request a legitimate TGT with this forged certificate.
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We're not limited to forging user certificates; we can do the same for machines. Combine this with the S4U2self trick to gain access to any machine or service in the domain.
