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    Login security - phishing resistant MFA

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • M
      michmoor LAYER 8 Rebel Alliance @jeffsmith82
      last edited by

      @jeffsmith82 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

      The root/admin account is a local account. You want that to be non-2FA so you can gain entry into the device.

      No you dont. If all your accounts are 2FA then how does anyone admin a device? I have never seen any deployment like that because it honeslty doesnt make sense.

      @jeffsmith82 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

      I have my pfsense set up to use Duo + Ldap - do you have a guide or something you used for this ?

      https://duo.com/docs/authproxy-reference
      You need an LDAP or AD server and install the Duo proxy service on a separate server.

      Having malware on your computer then logging into your firewall -- the issue isnt the firewall. The issue is that you believed that the laptop should be a trusted device that is able to connect to the firewall and admin it. The way i administer my firewall or any network element is i do so from a management network. You take all the same precautions [firewall rules, threat prevention, XDR agent if you use such a thing, etc..]. Its tightly locked down. If you admin from VPN then same things apply [ tight rules, threat prevention, XDR agent on the laptop]. Lots of this is on your security profile. I wouldnt look to passkeys as the ultimate solution and I definitely wouldn't say that "such an important security appliance to most doesnt have the most basic security measures that are required these days" when you havent done the necessary preparation on your part.

      Firewall: NetGate,Palo Alto-VM,Juniper SRX
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      • J
        jeffsmith82 @michmoor
        last edited by jeffsmith82

        @michmoor Had crowdstrike/falcon installed on the laptop and it still never picked it up. Not sure how me logging into a machine in a management network from a laptop increases my security if the laptop has a keylogger installed on it.

        Not having 2FA on the firewalls is still weaker security than having 2FA. Saying but you should have better security somewhere else doesn't really help the security of the firewall.

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        • NollipfSenseN
          NollipfSense @jeffsmith82
          last edited by

          @jeffsmith82 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

          user was phished and get their Azure creds stolen and hackers can now login they can add a new 2FA method. They use this to gain access to internal network over VPN and can use their new 2FA codes to get in. This is real world scenario that is actually pretty common unfortunately.

          Sorry to learn of this despite the careless picture it paints...

          pfSense+ 23.09 Lenovo Thinkcentre M93P SFF Quadcore i7 dual Raid-ZFS 128GB-SSD 32GB-RAM PCI-Intel i350-t4 NIC, -Intel QAT 8950.
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          • J
            jeffsmith82 @NollipfSense
            last edited by

            @NollipfSense not sure why your attacking me over one of my users clicking a phishing link. Good to know all your users are 100% perfect and never do these sorts of things.

            In the real world though these things happen and then what you do you look at the root cause and make sure it doesn't happen again. So training for the user and roll out phishing resistant authentication is what we are doaing. So im here asking for fishing resistant auth for something thats important in our infrastructure.

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            • M
              michmoor LAYER 8 Rebel Alliance @jeffsmith82
              last edited by

              @jeffsmith82 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

              In the real world though these things happen and then what you do you look at the root cause and make sure it doesn't happen again. So training for the user and roll out phishing resistant authentication is what we are doaing. So im here asking for fishing resistant auth for something thats important in our infrastructure.

              I get what your saying. Whatever security tools you used, failed you. So thats problem 1.
              You have not set up 2FA on the firewall which you can do with the link i provided.

              I only take issue with your below statement.

              @jeffsmith82 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

              It doesn't look good that such an important security appliance to most doesn't have the most basic security measures that are required these days.

              This just objectively isnt true. By all measures, pfSense is very secure. Having additional security checks that you want are fine but do not take away from what the product - pfsense - already has at its core which is security.

              Firewall: NetGate,Palo Alto-VM,Juniper SRX
              Routing: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
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              • stephenw10S
                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                last edited by

                I don't think anyone really disagrees that it would be good to have some form of native MFA in pfSense.

                M J 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 3
                • J
                  jeffsmith82 @michmoor
                  last edited by

                  @jeffsmith82 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

                  It doesn't look good that such an important security appliance to most doesn't have the most basic security measures that are required these days.

                  This just objectively isnt true. By all measures, pfSense is very secure. Having additional security checks that you want are fine but do not take away from what the product - pfsense - already has at its core which is security.

                  So 2FA isn't built in to the core product which is by all measures these days it's not secure. Try and get cyber insurance if you don't say you use 2FA and see what you get quoted compared to if you do have it as proof of this.

                  https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/4242 here is an 8 year old issue raised asking for 2FA for the admin login that is still open and not confident this is going to happen any time soon but worth asking right.

                  Implementing SAML so pfsense doesn't have to deal with authentication and push it off to a third party service like Azure would be a great option too. Someone made a project that implements everything that's required as far as I can see https://github.com/jaredhendrickson13/pfsense-saml2-auth This should have been made part of the core product. https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/11920 2 year old issue here pointing this out.

                  I have used pfsense since about 2008 and I do really like it but it's okay to admit it has faults and not having decent 2FA is a big one. Not having a decent 2FA option for any of the out of the box VPN's is number 2 on my list of issues. https://www.netgate.com/blog/freeradius-on-pfsense-for-2fa having to manully recreate a user list and somehow hand out the QR codes to register users isn't exactly easy.

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                  • M
                    michmoor LAYER 8 Rebel Alliance @stephenw10
                    last edited by

                    @stephenw10 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

                    I don't think anyone really disagrees that it would be good to have some form of native MFA in pfSense.

                    100%

                    Firewall: NetGate,Palo Alto-VM,Juniper SRX
                    Routing: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
                    Switching: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
                    Wireless: Unifi, Aruba IAP
                    JNCIP,CCNP Enterprise

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                    • M
                      michmoor LAYER 8 Rebel Alliance @jeffsmith82
                      last edited by

                      @jeffsmith82 No argument from me that there should be some level of modernization in the base code.
                      I would welcome SAML support wholeheartedly.

                      Firewall: NetGate,Palo Alto-VM,Juniper SRX
                      Routing: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
                      Switching: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
                      Wireless: Unifi, Aruba IAP
                      JNCIP,CCNP Enterprise

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                      • J
                        jeffsmith82 @stephenw10
                        last edited by

                        @stephenw10 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

                        I don't think anyone really disagrees that it would be good to have some form of native MFA in pfSense.

                        Someone has already done the hard work and written a package for it https://github.com/jaredhendrickson13/pfsense-saml2-auth would be great to see this either become a supported one by netgate or just migrate it into the core.

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                        • stephenw10S
                          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                          last edited by stephenw10

                          There's an open feature request for that too: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/11920

                          Comments welcome. That was discussed internally though and there were some issues with it making it non-trivial.

                          Steve

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                          • J
                            jeffsmith82 @stephenw10
                            last edited by

                            @stephenw10 Would be interested to know what the non-trivial issues are.

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • stephenw10S
                              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                              last edited by

                              I wasn't involved directly, might be better to ask about that on the ticket. Unless one of the developers chimes in here....

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                              • NollipfSenseN
                                NollipfSense @jeffsmith82
                                last edited by

                                @jeffsmith82 said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

                                not sure why your attacking me

                                How is this attacking you? How does "Sorry to learn of this despite the careless picture it paints..." turned to attacking you? How did you interpret it as an attack on you? Did I said YOU ARE CARELESS...no. Does the hacking appears to paint careless imagery...it sure does...doesn't it?

                                pfSense+ 23.09 Lenovo Thinkcentre M93P SFF Quadcore i7 dual Raid-ZFS 128GB-SSD 32GB-RAM PCI-Intel i350-t4 NIC, -Intel QAT 8950.
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                                • NollipfSenseN
                                  NollipfSense @jeffsmith82
                                  last edited by NollipfSense

                                  @jeffsmith82 After extensive research, the passkey actually appears best suited for a firewall, whether one is surfing or working the web...maybe as a package or if pfSense continues its plan to add API for WebAuthn and to store the public keys, rather than say icloud keychain or Google or Microsoft. Thank you for bring it up.

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                                  • T
                                    TheUniquePaulSmith
                                    last edited by

                                    I decided to take on implementing this feature as a personal project because I want it on my Netgate 6100.
                                    The request has a working pull request against RELENG_2_7_2 - https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/15244

                                    I hope it gets approved for everyone to use as it's very convenient :)

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                                    • stephenw10S
                                      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                      last edited by

                                      Looks promising. 😀

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                                      • NollipfSenseN
                                        NollipfSense @TheUniquePaulSmith
                                        last edited by

                                        @TheUniquePaulSmith Since you have incorporated WebAuthn, it should be now possible for it to store all private key on the firewall, isn't it? Thank you for your hard work and commitment.

                                        pfSense+ 23.09 Lenovo Thinkcentre M93P SFF Quadcore i7 dual Raid-ZFS 128GB-SSD 32GB-RAM PCI-Intel i350-t4 NIC, -Intel QAT 8950.
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                                        • T
                                          TheUniquePaulSmith @NollipfSense
                                          last edited by

                                          @NollipfSense said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

                                          @TheUniquePaulSmith Since you have incorporated WebAuthn, it should be now possible for it to store all private key on the firewall, isn't it? Thank you for your hard work and commitment.

                                          No, only the public keys are stored on the pfsense system, which while ideally should be kept confidential, has little to no implication of being exposed publicly (hence public key).
                                          The private key is kept and stored on the authenticator (Windows Hello\Android\iOS) typically via hardware backed TPM and usually not accessible or exportable by the user.

                                          Most authenticators (and through part of the defined standard) are enforcement of user attestation that requires a factor of authentication to be used before transacting with the private key on the authenticator (such as biometrics/pin).
                                          This helps prevent lost or stolen authenticators being used by malicious actors. A lot of the authenticators also employ techniques like anti-hammering to prevent hardware-based attacks like PIN brute forcing.

                                          Authenticators meet the requirements of multifactor authentication.
                                          They are "something you have" such as hardware backed TPM device which would be difficult to "clone"
                                          Then "unlocked" via "something you are" usually via biometrics (FaceID, Fingerprint, even palm vein readings! 😮)
                                          Or by something you know such as a convivence PIN (whereby a 4-digit PIN with FIDO is more secure than say a 20-character generated static password)

                                          Which then performs an authentication against the site (pfsense webui) similar to mutual-TLS.

                                          This authentication method also defeats common phishing attacks, since the registration is tied to the "website FQDN" making authentication to phishing sites almost pointless & useless.

                                          More Info:
                                          https://fidoalliance.org/how-fido-works/
                                          https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/security-101/what-is-fido2
                                          https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/identity-protection/hello-for-business/faq#why-a-pin-is-better-than-an-online-password

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                                          • NollipfSenseN
                                            NollipfSense @TheUniquePaulSmith
                                            last edited by

                                            @TheUniquePaulSmith said in Login security - phishing resistant MFA:

                                            No, only the public keys are stored on the pfsense system,

                                            Actually, that's what I meant, the public key...sweet!!!

                                            pfSense+ 23.09 Lenovo Thinkcentre M93P SFF Quadcore i7 dual Raid-ZFS 128GB-SSD 32GB-RAM PCI-Intel i350-t4 NIC, -Intel QAT 8950.
                                            pfSense+ 23.09 VM-Proxmox, Dell Precision Xeon-W2155 Nvme 500GB-ZFS 128GB-RAM PCIe-Intel i350-t4, Intel QAT-8950, P-cloud.

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