MaLDAPtive: Obfuscation and De-Obfuscation

LDAP and Active Directory Visibility

DAP is no stranger to the security spotlight. While LDAP is a protocol (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and Active Directory is the most popular directory services system that supports a subset of LDAP, the terms “LDAP” and “AD” are tightly coupled when discussing the execution, detection and prevention of attacks targeting directory services data.

Query Obfuscation Mechanics

In the last decade the widespread offensive value of querying AD data via LDAP was cemented with the release of open-source tools such as BloodHound and PingCastle. However, proper visibility of LDAP queries mostly remains a privileged asset for those organizations with deep pockets, and the commercial security tools providing this visibility are often woefully fixated on simple signature-based detections.

De-Obfuscation and Detection Engineering

MaLDAPtive is the 2,000-hour (and counting) quest of offensive and defensive LDAP exploration and tool-building. This research includes mind-bending depths of obfuscation across all elements of LDAP queries (many undocumented and most never seen in the wild), all baked into an obfuscation/de-obfuscation/detection framework built upon our ground-up custom LDAP search filter tokenizer and syntax tree parser.

Come witness the release of our MaLDAPtive research and open-source framework: transforming LDAP from “lightweight” to “heavyweight.”