SAM & LSA secrets
MITRE ATT&CK™ Sub-techniques T1003.002, T1003.004 and T1003.005
Theory
In Windows environments, passwords are stored in a hashed format in registry hives like SAM (Security Account Manager) and SECURITY.
Hive | Details | Format or credential material |
---|---|---|
SAM | stores locally cached credentials (referred to as SAM secrets) | LM or NT hashes |
SECURITY | stores domain cached credentials (referred to as LSA secrets) | Plaintext passwords LM or NT hashes Kerberos keys (DES, AES) Domain Cached Credentials (DCC1 and DCC2) Security Questions ( |
SYSTEM | contains enough info to decrypt SAM secrets and LSA secrets | N/A |
SAM and LSA secrets can be dumped either locally or remotely from the mounted registry hives. These secrets can also be extracted offline from the exported hives. Once the secrets are extracted, they can be used for various attacks, depending on the credential format.
Credential material | Subsequent attacks |
---|---|
Plaintext passwords | |
LM and NT hashes | |
Kerberos keys (RC4, i.e. == NT hash) | |
Kerberos keys (DES, AES) | |
Domain Cached Credentials (DCC1 or DCC2) |
Practice
Exfiltration
Impacket's reg.py (Python) script can also be used to do the same operation remotely for a UNIX-like machine. For instance, this can be used to easily escalate from a Backup Operator member to a Domain Admin by dumping a Domain Controller's secrets and use them for a DCSync.
The attacker can start an SMB server, and indicate an UNC path including his IP address so that the hives get exported directly to his server.
Secrets dump
Here are some examples and tools that can be used for local/remote/offline dumping.
Impacket's secretsdump (Python) can be used to dump SAM and LSA secrets, either remotely, or from local files. For remote dumping, several authentication methods can be used like pass-the-hash (LM/NTLM), or pass-the-ticket (Kerberos).
Nota bene secretsdump and netexec both extract security questions, if any, from the LSA. They are json formatted, UTF-16-LE encoded, and hex encoded on top of that.
Resources
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