[Bro] Bro Log ingestion

Wed Sep 17 12:25:43 PDT 2014

Quite the responses, thanks!

Here are my thoughts.

I saw your post Doug, and on some of our projects we can use Security Onion
w/Bro and ELSA, but in this case it must be a RHEL based solution. The
solution Stephen R. demo'd with the Kibana approach [1] is pretty nice. But
it brought an issue to my attention. It appears that Logstash needs to
startup listening on a different port, 9292. I'm wondering if I missed
something or why Kibana wouldn't simply run as a plugin or additional
module under apache on port 443. We are in a highly regulated network, and
if I stand up an Apache server (where all the Bro logs are going to be
placed), and the Apache server is listening on a non secure (!443) port
such as 9292, then it causes flags to be thrown up everywhere and always
kills my project. Additional thoughts on that?

Stephen H, not a nit-pick at all, great post! =) My method for moving the
logs from all the seensors to a central collector at this point are still
in the works. My best route is probably to use 'rsync'. The problem I have
right now is that Bro logs and extracted files have 600 permissions when
they are created. The cause is simply the umask for root on the servers,
which is set to 077. Since the servers are configured (correctly) to not
allow SSH by root, then my rsync proposal also died since all the files are
accessible by root only. Also, I'm unable to change the umask of root
(regulations not know how) so short of creating an every minute chmod 644
cronjob, I'm scratching my head on how to get the logs over to
the collector/ apache server.

You make an excellent point though " The downside is that this can require
quite the large amount of infrastructure… and the only way to find out
exactly how much your environment will need is to build it and see. It also
requires that you keep up to date in knowledge on 3 pieces of software and
how they interact…"
The knowledge and infrastructure count / increase is a large flag that will
prohibit that endeavor (but great to know about).

Both you, John L., and Will H. indicate Splunk though as your solution
which gives me another option.  But I have the same "question about
ingestion" =) How did you get the logs from the multiple sensors to the
"ingestion / collector server"? Rsync, SCP, owner / permission issues? I'm
interested for sure. But.....the cost is a big no-no as well. As Will H.
indicated the cost can go up based on usage, I do need a truly open-source
free solution, so I am now leaning back to ElasticSearch / LogStash unless
I missed something.

Paul H. , you get to use FreeBSD... <drool>... Man do I miss FreeBSD! Give
me packages or give me death, haha. Ever since we were forced to use RHEL I
miss it more and more! But to your comments, this sentence really caught my
attention: "...the logs are sent to a collector via syslog-ng.." Then you
said "There, they are written to disk where they are read by logstash and
sent to elasticsearch". Since I'm leaning in the Logstash / ElasticSearch
method, based on above thoughts, can you share a bit more on how you set up
the syslog-ng, logstash, elasticsearch? That seems to be really close to
meeting my requirement. I'm assuming you installed them as source and set
them in the rc.conf to enabled YES to startup on boot. I'm more interested
in the details of the conf files on with what arguments the daemons start
up and especially how you were able to get the syslog-ng piece working
between the sensor and the collector.

[1] http://www.appliednsm.com/parsing-bro-logs-with-logstash/

Thanks again to all, this is great stuff.

JW

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:42 AM, Stephen Reese <rsreese at gmail.com> wrote:

> Jonathon,
>
> As pointed out, a Redis solution may be an ideal open-source route, e.g.
> http://michael.bouvy.net/blog/en/2013/11/19/collect-visualize-your-logs-logstash-elasticsearch-redis-kibana/
>
>
> On Wednesday, September 17, 2014, Hosom, Stephen M <hosom at battelle.org>
> wrote:
>
>>  Jonathon,
>>
>>
>>
>> As a nit-pick, just because the files are owned by root, doesn’t mean
>> they aren’t world-readable. J The absolute simplest solution to allow
>> the logs to be viewable by non-root users is to scp them to a centralized
>> server, but I’m guessing you want something a little fancier than that.
>>
>>
>>
>> If you can do it, go with free Splunk. If you can afford it, go with paid
>> Splunk.
>>
>>
>>
>> Otherwise:
>>
>>
>>
>> For log viewing with Elasticsearch Kibana works great, but, you could
>> also check out Brownian: https://github.com/grigorescu/Brownian.
>>
>>
>>
>> For log storage, if you want to consider something other than
>> Elasticsearch, VAST is an option! https://github.com/mavam/vast There’s
>> no GUI, so that might be a downer for you.
>>
>>
>>
>> As far as Elasticsearch architecture goes, using Bro to write directly
>> into Elasticsearch is definitely the easiest option. The only concern with
>> this setup is that if Elasticsearch gets busy, nobody is happy.
>> Elasticsearch has a tendency to drop writes when it is too occupied. This
>> combined with the fact that (to the best of my knowledge) the Elasticsearch
>> writer is a ‘send it and forget it’ could result in some hardship if you
>> under build your Elasticsearch cluster or you undergo a period of unusually
>> high utilization.
>>
>>
>>
>> Seth has some interesting stuff using NSQ that he has written, but I’m
>> not sure that it is technically ‘supported’. His NSQ stuff allows you to
>> send the events to Elasticsearch at a rate that Elasticsearch is
>> comfortable with.
>>
>>
>>
>> Lastly, you could use the Logstash agent to send logs to a Redis server,
>> which buffers the logs for additional Logstash agents to pull from and
>> parse to insert into Elasticsearch. At the moment, I think that this is the
>> most redundant setup. If you want as many logs to make it into
>> Elasticsearch as possible while keeping the Bro side of things as simple as
>> possible, this is likely the way to go. The downside is that this can
>> require quite the large amount of infrastructure… and the only way to find
>> out exactly how much your environment will need is to build it and see. It
>> also requires that you keep up to date in knowledge on 3 pieces of software
>> and how they interact…
>>
>>
>>
>> Hopefully that helps at least a little!
>>
>>
>>
>> -Stephen
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* bro-bounces at bro.org [mailto:bro-bounces at bro.org] *On Behalf Of *Jonathon
>> Wright
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, September 16, 2014 11:04 PM
>> *To:* Stephen Reese
>> *Cc:* bro at bro.org
>> *Subject:* Re: [Bro] Bro Log ingestion
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks Steven, I'll take a look at those.
>>
>> I'm assuming my central point server would then need Apache with
>> ElasticSearch and Kibana installed. I'm sure more questions will come as I
>> start looking into this. Thanks again for the info!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 4:28 PM, Stephen Reese <rsreese at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>   On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 9:54 PM, Jonathon Wright <
>> jonathon.s.wright at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  Research
>>
>> Looking around and doing some reading, I've found two possible solutions
>> ELSA and LOGSTASH although I don't know them very well and / or what their
>> capabilities are either. But I'd like to know if they are viable,
>> especially given my scenario, or if there is something better. Also, a
>> how-to so I can set it up.
>>
>>
>>
>> You might want to skip on the Logstash piece and push the data directly
>> to ElasticSearch per [1] unless you have a specific requirement. From there
>> you could use Kibana [2] or whatever to interface with data stored in
>> ElasticSearch.
>>
>> [1] https://www.bro.org/sphinx/frameworks/logging-elasticsearch.html
>> [2] http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana/
>>
>>
>>
>
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