Pivoting: Setting up a port proxy with netsh on Windows

TL;DR: Pivot by setting up a portproxy between your machine and a machine in another network using netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=<port in> connectport=<port out> connectaddress=<destination>.

Let’s say machine A has access to a Windows machine, B, which has an additional interface configured to reach machines in another (internal) network, including machine C. As our machine A cannot directly talk to machine C and vice versa, what can we do to pick up files hosted on our machine A from machine C, or do further reconnaissance of C from A?

One quick and easy way is to configure a “portproxy” on machine B, which listens on a specified port and sends incoming traffic on to machine C or A (depending on the use case). Let’s have a look on how to do that for an IPv4 to IPv4 configuration.

For this example we have:

• A at 192.168.1.2
• B at 192.168.1.3 and 10.10.10.3
• C at 10.10.10.4

Setup on machine B

On machine B, execute the following:

netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=1337 connectport=8000 connectaddress=192.168.1.2

Here, we are setting up a portproxy that will listen on port 1337 and send the received data to the connectaddress (A) on port 8000. This is done via a separate TCP connection, as you can observe via Wireshark.

Let’s verify the setting looks good with netsh interface portproxy show v4tov4.

Listen on IPv4:             Connect to IPv4:

Address         Port        Address         Port
--------------- ----------  --------------- ----------
*               1337        192.168.1.2     8000

Note that the portproxy config will be stored in the registry, so this is the place where you can detect persistent portproxies without using netsh.

Get-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PortProxy\v4tov4\tcp

*/1337       : 192.168.1.2/8000
...

To be able to try it out, let’s poke a hole into our firewall (still on B):

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Proxy all the things" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=1337

Setup on machine A for hosting

On our machine A we will now start a webserver and host a file:

python3 -m http.server 8000 in a directory with a test.txt containing Hello from A.

Fetch from machine C

On our machine C let’s write up a short download cradle to fetch and then output the file’s content from machine A:

powershell.exe -c echo (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString('http://10.10.10.3:1337/test.txt')

Machine C will now reach out to B (10.10.10.3) on port 1337, which will reach out to A on port 8000 to fetch test.txt. We can see a hit from 192.168.1.3 in our Python webserver console and the results of test.txt printed on machine C.

Naturally, this also works in the other direction (A reaching C through B). Just set up the the right connectaddress and connectport.

To remove the portproxy, you can use delete v4tov4 like so:

netsh interface portproxy delete v4tov4 listenport=1337

And to remove the firewall rule again:

netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="Proxy all the things"

Note that you may get a deprecation warning when using netsh on modern systems. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a simple way/Cmdlet to setup a portproxy in PowerShell. Do you know how? Please let me know.