Kerberos Unconstrained Delegation: Compromising a Computer Object by its TGT
Everything that involves Kerberos functionality is such a complex subject… since I’ve been abusing these attack chains a lot recently, I thought this post would be helpful to someone.
NOTE: Nothing explained here is new at all. If you understand how Delegations work you may be already aware of these vectors. Nonetheless it might not be as straight forward for everyone, hence I’m writing this.
If you are not familiar with Kerberos Delegation, you can find some links in the References section as I don’t feel necessary to explain what is already perfectly explained by others.
Introduction
Ok let’s asume we've compromised Web01.capsule.corp
, a server with Kerberos Unconstrained Delegation enabled:

At this moment we should know that if any principal - user, system, service account - connects to any of the services offered by our compromised system, it will drop a copy of its TGT unless it’s configured as a protected principal (protected users / account is sensitive). For example, let’s say Bulma lists the C$ share of our compromised machine. Once she does that, we will be able to dump her TGT from the resulting network session.


As seen in Not A Security Boundary: Breaking Forest Trusts, we also know we can use certain remote procedure calls to make arbitrary principals to connect to our Unconstrained system. In that post we saw how RPC’s MS-RPRN protocol was leveraged to obtain a TGT from an external Domain Controller. Although Microsoft fixed the issue across Forest trusts, you can still potentially abuse it within your Forest. If the previous technique succeeds, you can obtain a Domain Controller TGT. Since these systems happen to be replicating data to each other, becoming one of them allows you to do it aswell. This essentially translates to: using a Domain Controller’s TGT allows you to DCSync any credential you desire from the targeted domain.
Here is an example with DC02$
from the BADABING.SOPRANO.SL
domain (ws04.badabing.soprano.sl is the Unconstrained system):


However, in some scenarios we will notice the spooler service is disabled on Domain Controllers, or there are measures so you cannot force them to connect to arbitrary systems using the previous approach. This is the case for my other domain (CAPSULE.CORP
).
How could I use this approach with non-DC Systems to compromise CAPSULE.CORP
?
Compromising a Computer Object by its TGT
The first thing we should be aware of is that computer accounts don’t have logon permissions on any system by default. This means that if you manage to obtain a TGT for the WS04$
computer account, you should not have any explicit access to the system represented by that same account (WS04.capsule.corp
in this case).
However, as we did with the Domain Controller TGT, we can take advantage of any permissions the computer account might have. There are two “general” straight forward scenarios:
- By default, computer accounts have privileges to configure Resource-Based Constrained Delegation (RBCD) for themselves.
- Computers with LAPS installed need privileges to rotate the local administrator password, which is stored in one attribute of the computer object.
Sometimes we also see weird situations where a computer account might be a member of the Domain Admins group or happen to have random high privileges (good old Exchange). In all those situations, we can try this approach and it will likely result in a full domain compromise sooner or later.
RBCD
Let’s say we want to compromise WS04.capsule.corp
as it is the CEO machine. First we would make that system connect to our Unconstrained Web01.capsule.corp
and drop its TGT. In the image below we see our desired ticket (note these network logons do not last forever, so be fast dumping the ticket. Otherwhise Rubeus has a “monitor” function to catch them easily with filters):

Then we would Pass the Ticket to impersonate WS04$
and configure RBCD. As we already compromised Web01$
, we can use it as the trusted principal.

Finally we just invoke S4U2Self
and S4U2Proxy
to obtain valid service tickets as any user and compromise WS04
.


LAPS
With LAPS is pretty much the same. Although we cannot see the password by default, we can modify it to arbitrary values. This can be seen in the images below.
EDIT: As pointed out by @_dirkjan, this change is useless as the password is not stored from the LDAP attribute to SAM. My bad for being lazy and not confirming the password was working! I will let this PoC though as it serves as another example of reaching things, even if it is useless in this case.



Conclusions and Mitigations
Here we have shown two interesting examples on how to compromise a system through the impersonation of its associated computer account. However, as it’s been said, there could be tons of possibilities in highly populated domains where a lot of custom groups and relatioships exist.
- Watchout the usage of Kerberos Unconstrained Delegation. It should not be necessary to use this delegation as there are really good alternatives: Constrained Delegation and RBCD.
- As a defender, always review the privileges of your principals. Not only user accounts, EVERY principal.
- A really good documentation is provided by Microsoft about securing privileged access and all it involves HERE
- Also, review default configurations in your domain. We probably don’t want that every system can configure RBCD for itself among other risky default settings.
Hope you enjoyed this post! ~ ATTL4S
References
-
Active Directory Security Risk #101: Kerberos Unconstrained Delegation (or How Compromise of a Single Server Can Compromise the Domain): https://adsecurity.org/?p=1667
-
Not A Security Boundary: Breaking Forest Trusts: https://www.harmj0y.net/blog/redteaming/not-a-security-boundary-breaking-forest-trusts/
-
Wagging the Dog: Abusing Resource-Based Constrained Delegation to Attack Active Directory: https://shenaniganslabs.io/2019/01/28/Wagging-the-Dog.html
-
(Self advertising :D) Kerberos Resource-Based Constrained Delegation: When an Image Change Leads to a Privilege Escalation: https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2019/august/kerberos-resource-based-constrained-delegation-when-an-image-change-leads-to-a-privilege-escalation/