Active Directory (Part 4)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 






Basics

Trees, Forests, and Trusts

There are in-built logical structures called Trees and Forests, within Active Directory, to organize as well as manage the resources and the users in a domain.

A tree is a hierarchical structure consisting of a root domain and one or more child domains organized in a hierarchy. All domains in a tree share a common namespace, meaning they have the same naming conventions and naming structure.

A forest is a collection of one or more trees that are connected by trust relationships. Trust relationships helps the users present in one tree to access the resources of another tree, if they have required permissions. Forest often represent different business units or organizations that need to share resources but maintain separate identities and namespaces. All trees have trust connection with each other.

Trusts that can be established in an AD are:

  • External Trusts- They allow the users of one domain to access the other forest's domain resources. These trusts often allow users of one forest to access resources in another forest or in a non-Active Directory domain. 

  • Forest Trusts- They allow users in forest to access resources in another forest. They often allow users in one business unit or organization to access resources in another business unit or organization within the same company.

  • Shortcut Trusts- They allow users in one domain to access resources of a domain present in the different part of the same forest, that is not directly reachable. They are often used to improve the performance of authentication requests between domains that are not directly connected. 

  • Realm Trusts- They allow users in non-Active Directory domain, like domain running on Unix and Linux operating system, to access resources in an AD domain. 

Trees and Forests are useful for organizing and managing resources and users in a domain. This is because they allow the administrators to delegate control and set policies for specific groups of users and resources. They can also offer ways to share resources and establish trust relationships between different parts of the organization. The penetration tester exploits AD environment, takes complete control over it, and document his findings. 

The tester may be able to exploit a trust relationship if the tree has trust relationships with other trees or forests and can try to exploit them to gain access to resources in the other trees or forests. It can be easily done by compromising a user account in the trusted domain and using it to access resources in the trusting domain. 

Conclusion

This part talks in detail about Trees, Forests, and Trusts, how they can be established, and how a penetration tester can exploit them to access resources. 
































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