Autosnort: MSF edition

Working on some changes to Autosnort.

After seeing Darkoperator's MSF Installer script, I wanted to change how Autosnort operates a little bit.

You see, one of the cool things about metasploit is that It will log to hell and back if things are or are not working, but while you're actually running it, It only tells you what you need to know:
 "This is what I'm trying to do right now"
"This good thing happened"
"This bad thing happened"
"This is something to be aware of."

Keeping this in mind, and heavily ganking the notification printing code from darkoperator, in combination with a crazy named pipe trick I found via stack overflow, I'm changing how autosnort presents information.

As it stands currently, Autosnort, to put it bluntly, pukes all over the terminal/screen buffer. If something exploded in a bloody mess or failed to install correctly, you may see it and may be able to capture it in a screen shot and report it back to me, or you may not. Digital gods only know.

The way I've re-written the script, the only thing that gets printed to the screen are status messages indicating what the script is doing, good/bad messages to let you know if something failed or succeeded, and notifications that are sort of a "I need your input here" or "Pay attention to this!"

Apt-get (with the exception of the mysql-server installation that REQUIRES user input), configuration, compiler and all other output is redirected to log files.

For those of you who like seeing autosnort puke all over the screen or actually seeing what's going on behind the scenes, I found a nifty hack via stack overflow that uses mkfifo and named pipe magic to log everything from the script into a log file. No more running script to log output, no more screenshots, if you have a problem, you can e-mail me the output from the main autosnort script and/or the child interface installation scripts.

As of right now, I'm piloting this out on Debian, and it just looks slick. So far, I have the main script re-written and snorby's installation script re-written in this format. The other interface installers should fall in line easily enough, Snorby is the most complicated install I scripted out.

I haven't officially released either scripts out to github because I'm working on a couple other issues as well:

-- Support for both Debian 6 AND Debian 7 in the autosnort-debian main script
The only problem I'm seeing here at this point is that libmysqlclient.so (for barnyard2) installs in three different places in Debian 6 32/64 and Debian 7 32/64:
/usr/lib (Deb 6 32 and 64 bit)
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu (Deb 7 32)
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gne (Deb 7 64)

so I'm testing out a work-around involving the 'find' command and 'dirname' to fix this once and for all.

-- Support for Ubuntu 13.04
It's a short-term release, but some want to see support for it. It also appears to have an issue finding libmysqlclient.so

My theory is, if I can get find/dirname tested/working on Debian 6/7, likely I can get it to work between Ubuntu 12 and 13.04, hell I might be able to merge the Debian and Ubuntu autosnort scripts into a single script (since this was one of slight differences between the two).

So there's that.

I'm going to try and include a screenshot down here to preview what to expect, but so far, Blogger has somehow managed to not get my photos attached to my blog posts every time I've tried to use them.

First try:

Second try:
Via my twitter

Autosnorby, updates to autosnort, and the updated to-do list

Hello Snort and Autosnort users.

I've got a lot to talk about today, so let's get started.

First and foremost, I've finally managed to work in support for snorby into autosnort. The snorby script installs the necessary packages, a compatible version of ruby (via rvm), all the necessary gems and configures the right files with the right info needed to get snorby up and running. Additionally, I've managed to work out away to drop privileges from the root database user to another user (the snort user in our case)

One thing to be aware of: the delayed_job and the sensor cache jobs do NOT start up on boot. Initial runs of the script had me trying to put commands into rc.local to start the delayed_job and sensorcachejob commands on startup... but they aren't working. I'm working on having a reliable method to start them on boot, but until that is discovered, any time the system is restarted, you'll want to, at a minimum start the delayed_job script:

cd /var/www/snorby && ruby script/delayed_job start

optionally, these commands run the Sensor and Daily cachejobs as well:

cd /var/www/snorby && rails runner 'Snorby::Jobs::SensorCacheJob.new(false).perform; Snorby::Jobs::DailyCacheJob.new(false).perform'

There are options to start the snorby worker process via the web UI, but I find the direct approach to my liking.

Another note is that at first you may notice alerts coming in and displaying properly in the events tab, but the dashboard may not updated at first. If this is the case, on the dashboard page, there is an option to force cache update. Select this option, wait 10 seconds, and reload the page. the graphs should update.

Next up on the list, is the main autosnort script itself. I've done a bit of spring cleaning.

- I've reduced the number of packages installed by default with autosnort.
--By default all we install are the packages necessary to install daq, libdnet, snort, and barnyard 2 with the ability to write to a remote database (more on this in a minute)
--I introduced a quick check that asks the user if they plan on installing a web interface as a part of the autosnort installation, or if they just want a stripped-down barebones install. If you're not sure what option to pick, select option 1.

- I've added a couple of functions to the script near the beginning for pulled pork to facilitate code re-use. this is because:

-- I've added support to download snort rules from previous versions of snort; up to four versions prior.

Why: I ran into a little problem recently where the free rules for version 2.9.4.5 were not available yet, and snort version 2.9.4.6 had just came out. The current version of the script only checks for the current version of snort rules, and one version prior. So now, you have a choice for four versions of rules:

1) the current version (if you have a VRT subscription oink code; e.g. 2.9.4.6)
2) the previous version (the kind that registered users usually get access to; e.g. 2.9.4.5)
3) two more prior versions (in the event that they are needed and/or a similar situation arises)

- If the user has elected to not install a web interface, the script asks them if they have a remote database they want barnyard to log to. I haven't officially tested this feature yet, but theorhetically, this allows for distributed installations... Any volunteers to test this? :)

- The child shell scripts all have functionality to install the packages necessary for them to work individually Again to reduce clutter and excess packages installed by autosnort (e.g. reduce attack surface)

- thanks to DK1844, I have a couple of code cleaniness fixes that I have added, and future todo list items.

I've achieved most of the stuff I intended to do when I initially started this little project, but I still have more that I can do.

Speaking of to-do list items:

- SSL for all web interfaces (generate a default, self-signed SSL cert, use mod-rewrite and mod-ssl to force ssl usage for all web interfaces)
- Further testing with distributed installations (Can I get a master console to register events from a remote system?)
- Encrypted comms between master console and remote sensor (e.g. have barnyard dump database updates to the master console over a secure channel)
- Kali Linux testing! Since Kali is fully compliant with Debian standards, will the debian autosnort script work with it?


The updates to autosnort.sh, snorby, aanval, snortreport and base child shell scripts are being pushed to ubuntu tonight, with support for other operating systems (debian and centOS) to come soon.

Report bugs, problems, praise, feature requests, etc. to:

deusexmachina667 [at] gmail [dot] com

As always the code is on my github repo.

Happy snorting,

DA_667