I finally had a chance to sit down and play with BloodHound. This was an item on my hacker todo list for awhile now. In this blog post, I’ll take you through my initial steps setting up and using this tool. It’s my hope that this information will help you get started with BloodHound too.

What is BloodHound?

BloodHound is a tool to analyze and understand Active Directory Trust Relationships. For an offensive practitioner, this tool can highlight the hops you might take to reach a goal within a network. For a defensive practitioner, this tool is gold as it can show you the most likely paths an attacker might take. It’s a good exercise to decide which of these trust paths needs to exist and which you can eliminate.

BloodHound is open source (GPLv3) and its developers are Andy Robbins, Rohan Vazarkar, and Will Schroeder from Veris Group’s Adaptive Threat Division.

To get an initial taste of the tool, I recommend that you watch their Six Degrees of Domain Admin conference talk.

Setup

There are setup instructions on the BloodHound Wiki. These instructions do assume some familiarity with Neo4j. For the record, I have no familiarity with Neo4j. I found the Setting Up BloodHound on Debian Jessie post by Sanjiv Kawa very helpful. With Sanjiv’s information and the information on the BloodHound Wiki, I was able to get everything going on Kali Linux 2016 rolling without too much trouble.

Use

Once BloodHound is running, you’ll want to bring some data into it and give it a spin. There is an example database, but I chose to pull BloodHound data from my test environment and import it into the tool instead.

BloodHound comes with a PowerShell script with several cmdlets that make this process easy. Get-BloodHoundData collects the data BloodHound needs. This cmdlet will return a PowerShell object. It’s necessary to pipe this object to another cmdlet to take some action on it. The Export-BloodHoundCSV cmdlet will dump the BloodHound data into three CSV files.

powershell-import /path/to/BloodHound.ps1 powershell Get-BloodHoundData | Export-BloodHoundCSV

The CSV files will exist on the target where the above cmdlets were run. To import them into BloodHound: download the CSV files and use the Upload function in BloodHound’s interface.

From this point, you’re ready to run queries against this data. BloodHound has several pre-built queries and it’s also very easy to ask BloodHound to give you a trust path from one identity or system to another.

In this video I demonstrate these steps:

Summary

I think BloodHound is one of the neatest things to come into the red teamer’s arsenal this year. While my demo network is easy to go through by hand, imagine the use of this tool in a much larger environment with more complex trusts. There’s a lot of power here.