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MITRE ATT&CK® Technique

T1172: Domain Fronting

Domain fronting takes advantage of routing schemes in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and other services which host multiple domains to obfuscate the intended destination of HTTPS traffic or traffic tunneled through HTTPS. CitationFifield Blocking Resistent Communication through domain fronting 2015 The technique involves using different domain names in the SNI field of the TLS header and the Host field of the HTTP header. If both domains are served from the same CDN, then the CDN may route to the address specified in the HTTP header after unwrapping the TLS header. A variation of the the technique, "domainless" fronting, utilizes a SNI field that is left blank; this may allow the fronting to work even when the CDN attempts to validate that the SNI and HTTP Host fields match (if the blank SNI fields are ignored).

For example, if domain-x and domain-y are customers of the same CDN, it is possible to place domain-x in the TLS header and domain-y in the HTTP header. Traffic will appear to be going to domain-x, however the CDN may route it to domain-y.

EnterpriseT1172TechniqueObject v1.1Modified
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Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Domain Fronting

Domain fronting takes advantage of routing schemes in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and other services which host multiple domains to obfuscate the intended destination of HTTPS traffic or traffic tunneled through HTTPS. CitationFifield Blocking Resistent Communication through domain fronting 2015 The technique involves using different domain names in the SNI field of the TLS header and the Host field of the HTTP header. If both domains are served from the same CDN, then the CDN may route to the address specified in the HTTP header after unwrapping the TLS header. A variation of the the technique, "domainless" fronting, utilizes a SNI field that is left blank; this may allow the fronting to work even when the CDN attempts to validate that the SNI and HTTP Host fields match (if the blank SNI fields are ignored).

For example, if domain-x and domain-y are customers of the same CDN, it is possible to place domain-x in the TLS header and domain-y in the HTTP header. Traffic will appear to be going to domain-x, however the CDN may route it to domain-y.

View the same entry on attack.mitre.org (MITRE-hosted reference; in-page links above use the Glexia ATT&CK library.)

Glexia analysis

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ATT&CK release
19.2
Object version
1.1
Created
Modified
Raw hash
4adaf0a7f81813cb...
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