After a few quiet months I’m excited to say I’ve pushed through some improvements recently to PyHSS and it’s growing into a more usable HSS platform.
MongoDB Backend
This has a few obvious advantages – More salable, etc, but also opens up the ability to customize more of the subscriber parameters, like GBR bearers, etc, that simple flat text files just wouldn’t support, as well as the obvious issues with threading and writing to and from text files at scale.
Knock knock.
Race condition.
Who’s there?
— Threading Joke.
For now I’m using the Open5GS MongoDB schema, so the Open5Gs web UI can be used for administering the system and adding subscribers.
The CSV / text file backend is still there and still works, the MongoDB backend is only used if you enable it in the YAML file.
The documentation for setting this up is in the readme.
SQN Resync
If you’re working across multiple different HSS’ or perhaps messing with some crypto stuff on your USIM, there’s a chance you’ll get the SQN (The Sequence Number) on the USIM out of sync with what’s on the HSS.
This manifests itself as an Update Location Request being sent from the UE in response to an Authentication Information Answer and coming back with a Re-Syncronization-Info AVP in the Authentication Info AVP. I’ll talk more about how this works in another post, but in short PyHSS now looks at this value and uses it combined with the original RAND value sent in the Authentication Information Answer, to find the correct SQN value and update whichever database backend you’re using accordingly, and then send another Authentication Information Answer with authentication vectors with the correct SQN.
SQN Resync is something that’s really cryptographically difficult to implement / confusing, hence this taking so long.
What’s next? – IMS / Multimedia Auth
The next feature that’s coming soon is the Multimedia Authentication Request / Answer to allow CSCFs to query for IMS Registration and manage the Cx and Dx interfaces.
Code for this is already in place but failing some tests, not sure if that’s to do with the MAA response or something on my CSCFs,
Note: NextEPC the Open Source project rebranded as Open5Gs in 2019 due to a naming issue. The remaining software called NextEPC is a branch of an old version of Open5Gs. This post was written before the rebranding.
I’ve been working for some time on Private LTE networks, the packet core I’m using is NextEPC, it’s well written, flexible and well supported.
I joined the Open5Gs group and I’ve contributed a few bits and pieces to the project, including a Python wrapper for adding / managing subscribers in the built in Home Subscriber Server (HSS).
Basic Python library to interface with MongoDB subscriber DB in NextEPC HSS / PCRF. Requires Python 3+, mongo, pymongo and bson. (All available through PIP)
If you are planning to run this on a different machine other than localhost (the machine hosting the MongoDB service) you will need to enable remote access to MongoDB by binding it’s IP to 0.0.0.0:
This is done by editing /etc/mongodb.conf and changing the bind IP to: bind_ip = 0.0.0.0
RTPengine has an API / control protocol, which is what Kamailio / OpenSER uses to interact with RTPengine, called the ng Control Protocol.
Connection is based on Bencode encoded data and communicates via a UDP socket.
I wrote a simple Python script to pull active calls from RTPengine, code below:
#Quick Python library for interfacing with Sipwise's fantastic rtpengine - https://github.com/sipwise/rtpengine
#Bencode library from https://pypi.org/project/bencode.py/ (Had to download files from webpage (PIP was out of date))
import bencode
import socket
import sys
import random
import string
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
server_address = ('188.0.169.13', 2224) #Your server address
cookie = "0_2393_6"
data = bencode.encode({'command': 'list'})
message = str(cookie) + " " + str(data)
print(message)
sent = sock.sendto(message, server_address)
print('waiting to receive')
data, server = sock.recvfrom(4096)
print('received "%s"' % data)
data = data.split(" ", 1) #Only split on first space
print("Cookie is: " + str(data[0]))
print("Data is: " + str(bencode.decode(data[1])))
print("There are " + str(len(bencode.decode(data[1])['calls'])) + " calls up on RTPengine at " + str(server_address[0]))
for calls in bencode.decode(data[1])['calls']:
print(calls)
cookie = "1_2393_6"
data = bencode.encode({'command': 'query', 'call-id': str(calls)})
message = str(cookie).encode('utf-8') + " ".encode('utf-8') + str(data).encode('utf-8')
sent = sock.sendto(message, server_address)
print('\n\nwaiting to receive')
data, server = sock.recvfrom(8192)
data = data.split(" ", 1) #Only split on first space
bencoded_data = bencode.decode(data[1])
for keys in bencoded_data:
print(keys)
print("\t" + str(bencoded_data[keys]))
sock.close()
I recently started working on an issue that I’d seen was to do with the HSS response to the MME on an Update Location Answer.
I took some Wireshark traces of a connection from the MME to the HSS, and compared that to a trace from a different HSS. (Amarisoft EPC/HSS)
The Update Location Answer sent by the Amarisoft HSS to the MME over the S6a (Diameter) interface includes an AVP for “Multiple APN Configuration” which has the the dedicated bearer for IMS, while the HSS in the software I was working on didn’t.
After a bit of bashing trying to modify the S6a responses, I decided I’d just implement my own Home Subscriber Server.
If you’d like to write your own software using SCTP there’s a fantastic SCTP sockets library from P1 Security that makes this easy as any other socket programming.
Take a look at the super simple client-server I made:
If we were to take the password password and hash it using an online tool to generate MD5 Hashes we’d get “482c811da5d5b4bc6d497ffa98491e38”
If we hash password again with MD5 we’d get the same output – “482c811da5d5b4bc6d497ffa98491e38”,
The catch with this is if you put “5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99” into a search engine, Google immediately tells you it’s plain text value. That’s because the MD5 of password is always 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99, hashing the same input phase “password” always results in the same output MD5 hash aka “response”.
By using Message Digest Authentication we introduce a “nonce” value and mix it (“salt”) with the SIP realm, username, password and request URI, to ensure that the response is different every time.
Let’s look at this example REGISTER flow:
We can see a REGISTER message has been sent by Bob to the SIP Server.
REGISTER sips:ss2.biloxi.example.com SIP/2.0 Via: SIP/2.0/TLS client.biloxi.example.com:5061;branch=z9hG4bKnashds7 Max-Forwards: 70 From: Bob <sips:[email protected]>;tag=a73kszlfl To: Bob <sips:[email protected]> Call-ID: [email protected] CSeq: 1 REGISTER Contact: <sips:[email protected]> Content-Length: 0
The SIP Server has sent back a 401 Unauthorised message, but includes the WWW-Authenticate header field, from this, we can grab a Realm value, and a Nonce, which we’ll use to generate our response that we’ll send back.
SIP/2.0 401 Unauthorized Via: SIP/2.0/TLS client.biloxi.example.com:5061;branch=z9hG4bKnashds7 ;received=192.0.2.201 From: Bob <sips:[email protected]>;tag=a73kszlfl To: Bob <sips:[email protected]>;tag=1410948204 Call-ID: [email protected] CSeq: 1 REGISTER WWW-Authenticate: Digest realm="atlanta.example.com", qop="auth",nonce="ea9c8e88df84f1cec4341ae6cbe5a359", opaque="", stale=FALSE, algorithm=MD5 Content-Length: 0
The formula for generating the response looks rather complex but really isn’t that bad.
Let’s say in this case Bob’s password is “bobspassword”, let’s generate a response back to the server.
We know the username which is bob, the realm which is atlanta.example.com, digest URI is sips:biloxi.example.com, method is REGISTER and the password which is bobspassword. This seems like a lot to go through but all of these values, with the exception of the password, we just get from the 401 headers above.
So let’s generate the first part called HA1 using the formula HA1=MD5(username:realm:password), so let’s substitute this with our real values: HA1 = MD5(bob:atlanta.example.com:bobspassword) So if we drop bob:atlanta.example.com:bobspassword into our MD5 hasher and we get our HA1 hash and it it looks like 2da91700e1ef4f38df91500c8729d35f, so HA1 = 2da91700e1ef4f38df91500c8729d35f
Now onto the second part, we know the Method is REGISTER, and our digestURI is sips:biloxi.example.com HA2=MD5(method:digestURI) HA2=MD5(REGISTER:sips:biloxi.example.com) Again, drop REGISTER:sips:biloxi.example.com into our MD5 hasher, and grab the output – 8f2d44a2696b3b3ed781d2f44375b3df This means HA2 = 8f2d44a2696b3b3ed781d2f44375b3df
Finally we join HA1, the nonce and HA2 in one string and hash it: Response = MD5(2da91700e1ef4f38df91500c8729d35f:ea9c8e88df84f1cec4341ae6cbe5a359:8f2d44a2696b3b3ed781d2f44375b3df)
Which gives us our final response of “bc2f51f99c2add3e9dfce04d43df0c6a”, so let’s see what happens when Bob sends this to the SIP Server.
