[Bro] optimize running bro from PCAPs / advantage of cluster mode

Mike Dopheide dopheide at gmail.com
Fri Sep 22 08:33:55 PDT 2017


Frank,

I would argue that using Bro's cluster configuration ends up making it a
lot easier for you in the long run.

1) To start, you only have one logger node so all of your logs will be in
one place and you don't have to worry about trying to consolidate them
later.
2) broctl provides an easy way to check the status of all of your nodes
without having to write anything custom.
3) Sync'ing all of your bro binaries and policies across all workers is
also done for you.
4) I question not needing to have shared tables, but I also don't know your
environment and your end goals.  That's how most of the scan detection
scripts work, by counting the number of anomalies over time across all of
your traffic.   If an attacker scans you ten times which are split across
ten bro nodes that aren't communicating with each other, you may miss it.
A lot of the malware detection policies also look for the inbound
connection and then a separate outbound connection.

Also, using broctl puts you in the same place as a lot of other other
installations so it's easier for people on this list to help troubleshoot.

-Dop



On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 6:15 AM, Frank Meier <franky.meier.1 at gmx.de> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> In contrast to the normal use case I run Bro mostly from pcaps. When
> huge amounts of data (~20 TB) have to be processed, bro in standalone
> mode becomes a real bottleneck. So I thought about using the bro cluster
> mode.
>
> In the past I thought, the bro workers would communicate with each
> other, so when for example one worker sees upstream and the other
> downstream, they would combine the information to one log. Seth told me
> at BroCon, that Bro needs to be fed complete streams. To do this some
> kind of load balancer is needed in front of bro.
>
> When I need to split the flows with a load balancer anyway, is there any
> advantage of running bro in cluster mode at all? I do not need any
> shared data like tables. Are there any parsers which combine the
> information seen by different workers in different flows?
>
> If cluster mode has no added value in my case, I could just load
> balance my pcaps to independent bro instances which would make my setup
> much easier.
>
> Have a nice weekend!
>
> Franky
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