[Samba] How does SMB 3.0 encryption work?

daniel at benoy.name daniel at benoy.name
Mon Aug 14 10:45:43 UTC 2017


I'm interested in using SMB encryption to connect over untrusted 
networks. I see that I can enable it in samba with 'smb encrypt = ...' 
which is great, and I'm seeing posts from Microsoft (like this one: 
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn551363(v=ws.11).aspx) 
bragging about how it can detect man-in-the-middle attacks.

Can anyone point me at the basic details of how it's able to do that?

I understand how it works for TLS, by using a trusted third party to 
sign the site's public key so you know an attacker has not slipped their 
key in instead. I know how it works for SSH. You have to manually 
compare a fingerprint of the public key, and that key will be cached so 
that you can be warned if it changes. IPSec (among other options) can 
simply use a pre-shared key that uses a symmetric cipher.

All of these different methods require configuring the client (in one 
way or another) to prearrange some information that allows it to tell 
the difference between the real server and an imposter, but I don't see 
how to do that in my smb.conf, so it makes me wonder whether I'm 
protected, and google isn't helping.

Is it perhaps using your password somehow? Like, if an attacker knew the 
password that the client is using to connect, would it then be able to 
MITM and watch all the writes and reads that client performs, but since 
an attacker is unlikely to know your password already, then they're 
unable to know the initial symmetric cipher that each side is 
expecting... or something like that?



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