dhcpoptinj - DHCP Option Injector

Have you ever wanted to intercept DHCP requests and squeeze in a few extra DHCP options, unbeknownst to the sender? Probably not. However, should the need ever come, dhcpoptinj will (hopefully) help you.

Why

There can be many a reason to mangle DHCP requests, although chances are you ought to look for a much better method for solving your problem. Perhaps you do not have access to the DHCP server/clients and need to modify their DHCP options, perhaps the DHCP software is difficult to configure (or does not support what you want to do), perhaps you have a very complex and/or odd setup, or perhaps you just want to experiment sending exotic or malformed options? There is a small chance that dhcoptinj might actually be of some use.

How

dhcpoptinj waits for packets to arrive in a netfilter queue. It will ensure that a packet is in fact a BOOTP/DHCP packet, and if so proceed to inject options. It will recalculate the IPv4 header checksum, disable the UDP checksum (for a simpler implementation) and then give the packet back to netfilter.

You need an iptables rule in order to intercept packets and send them to dhcpoptinj. Let us say you have two interfaces bridged together, eth0 and eth1 . Let us say you want to intercept all BOOTP requests coming from eth0 and inject the relay agent information option (82/0x52). Let us make up a silly payload: An agent circuit ID sub-option with the value "Fjas".

Add a rule to the iptables mangle table: sudo iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -m physdev --physdev-in eth0 -p udp --dport 67 -j NFQUEUE --queue-num 42 .

Then run dhcpoptinj (let us run it in the foreground with extra debug output): sudo dhcpoptinj -d -f -q 42 -o'52 01 04 46 6A 61 73' . Note that dhcpoptinj must be run by a user with the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability. You do not need to, and you really should not run dhcpoptinj as root. Instead, you can for instance grant the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability to the binary (using setcap ) and limit execution rights to only a specific user or group. This is a method used for running wireshark as non-root, so you will find several guides helping you accomplish this.

Now send a DHCP packet to the eth0 interface and watch it (using a tool like wireshark ) having been modified when it reaches the bridged interface. It should have the injected option at the end of the option list. If you capture the incoming DHCP packet with Wireshark, it will appear unmodified although it will in fact be mangled.

Note the format of the argument to the -o option: It should be a hexadecimal string starting with the DHCP option code followed by the option payload. The option length (the byte that normally follows the option code) is automatically calculated and must not be specified. The hex string can be delimited by non-hexadecimal characters for readability. All options must have a payload, except for the special pad option (code 0).

The layout of the nonsensical option used in this example (first the DHCP option layout , then the specific relay agent information option sub-option layout ) is as follows:

Code	Length	Data
52	(auto)	01 04 46 6A 61 73 ("Fjas")

Sub-opt.	Length	Data
01	4	46 6A 61 73 ("Fjas")

Note that dhcpoptinj does not care about what you write in the option payloads, neither does it check whether your option code exists. It does however forbid you to use the option code 255 (the terminating end option). dhcpoptinj inserts this option as the last option automatically.

Installing

dhcoptinj is quite a simple program and should be unproblematic to build.

Prerequisites

You need cmake and libnetfilter_queue (and a C compiler that supports C99). Hopefully, you are using a Debian-like system, in which case you can run the following to install them: sudo apt-get install cmake libnetfilter-queue-dev .

Build

Download or clone the source: git clone git://github.com/misje/dhcpoptinj
Enter the directory: cd dhcpoptinj
Run cmake: cmake . (or cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug . if you want a debug build)
Run make: make -j4
Install (optional, but you will benefit from having dhcpoptinj in your PATH): sudo make install

Demolish

Run sudo make uninstall from your build directory

The build directory with all its contents can be safely removed. If you did not use a build directory, you can get rid of all the cmake rubbish by running git clean -dfx . Note, however, that this removes everything in the project directory that is not under source control.

Help

This readme should have got you started. There is no man page for dhcpoptinj, but the help ( dhcpoptinj -h ) should cover everything the utility has to offer.

For bugs and suggestions please create an issue.

Limitations

dhcpoptinj is simple and will hopefully stay that way. Nonetheless, the following are missing features that hopefully will be added some day:

Remove options instead of having to replace them
Filter incoming packets by their DHCP message type (code 53) before mangling them

Troubleshooting

Failed to bind queue handler to AF_INET: Operation not permitted

Most likely you do not have CAP_NET_ADMIN capability or there is another process (perhaps another dhcpoptinj instance?) bound to the same netfilter queue number.

Known issues

I am not experienced in the netfilter library. There may be (although I cannot promise) bugs.

Syscall param socketcall.sendto(msg) points to uninitialised byte(s) valgrind error

This issue is not fully investigated yet.
Memory leak on non-normal exit.

This is not considered a leak. However, there should be no memory leak on a normal exit (catching SIGTERM, SIGINT or SIGHUP).

Useful information

When creating iptables rules to use with dhcpoptinj, the following options can be useful: