QuickTip: Howto secure your Mikrotik/RouterOS Router and specially Winbox

October 6, 2018

I didn’t post anything about the multiple security problems in the Mikrotik Winbox API, as I thought that whoever is leaving the management of a router open to the Internet should not configure routers at all. Of course it is common sense to open the management interface only on internal network interfaces and to source IP addresses you’re managing the routers.  But as this is quick tip I’ll show you how I configure my Mikrotiks for years.

/ip service
set telnet address=0.0.0.0/0 disabled=yes
set ftp address=0.0.0.0/0 disabled=yes
set www address=0.0.0.0/0 disabled=yes
set ssh address=10.7.0.0/16
set api disabled=yes
set winbox address=127.0.0.1/32
set api-ssl disabled=yes

As you see I’ve only enabled ssh and winbox and winbox is only listening on localhost. The ssh is protected with the Firewall to to be only reachable from my admin network. Also I disable the weak ciphers:

/ip ssh set strong-crypto=yes

And I’ve configured public key authentication for the ssh access.  Now your question is how to access the router with winbox? Simple, use ssh port forwarding. So the Winbox API is only accessible by users that have a valid ssh logon – and ssh is much more robust and secure than Winbox. On Linux  the port forwarding is done like this:

ssh -L 8291:127.0.0.1:8291 admin@<mikrotik>

On Windows you can do that same with Putty. In Winbox just connect to localhost:

2 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. Also in order to use ssh forwarding you need
    ip ssh set forwarding-enabled=local
    or
    set forwarding-enabled=both
    was disabled for me by default.

    Comment by STRSHR — September 28, 2019 #

  2. These are new options in the newer firmware, which did not exist at the time of writing this article. Thx for the comment.

    Comment by robert — September 28, 2019 #

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Powered by WordPress
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. 40 queries. 0.065 seconds.