Sguil
Author: Kustas Kurval
Cyber Security Engineering C11
Written 06.06.2016
Introduction
This tutorial was made to make an introduction to Sguil. Sguil (pronounced sgweel) is built by network security analysts for network security analysts. It is a collection of free software components for Network Security Monitoring (NSM) and event driven analysis of IDS alerts. Sguil's main component is an intuitive GUI that provides access to realtime events, session data, and raw packet captures. Sguil facilitates the practice of Network Security Monitoring and event driven analysis.
The Sguil client is written in tcl / tk and can be run on any operating system that supports tcl / tk (including Linux, *BSD, Solaris, MacOS, and Win32).
It is provided by Q Public License
Sguil integrates alert data from Snort, session data from SANCP, and full content data from a second instance of Snort running in packet logger mode.
In this introduction I will be covering Sguil in Xbuntu. You will need to know basic Linux syntax and terminology also some terminology concerning overall intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) and overall basic networking.
Software architecture
A sguil system is composed of a single sguil server and an arbitrary number of sguil network sensors. The sensors perform all the security monitoring tasks and feed information back to the server on a regular basis. The server coordinates this information, stores it in a database and communicates with sguil clients running on administrators' desktop machines. It can also issue requests for specific information from the sensors.
Each sensor monitors a single network link (although you can have multiple sensors on one physical machine). They collect several different types of information:
- Snort monitors the link for security events, and logs them to a file on the local disk.
- Barnyard takes events from the snort log file and sends them to the sensor agent, which inserts them into database running on the sguil server in near real-time
- A separate instance of snort logs the full content of all network packets to the local disk (this typically requires a large separate data partition)
- SANCP records TCP/IP sessions and forwards them to the database on the sguil server
- The sguil agent also listens for commands from the sguil server. These commands are typically requests for packet data previously logged by Snort.
Tools that usually make up Sguil
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| MySQL 4.x or 5.x | Data storage and retrieval |
| Snort 2.x / Suricata | Intrusion detection alerts, scan detection, packet logging |
| Barnyard / Barnyard2 | Decodes IDS alerts and sends them to sguil |
| SANCP | TCP/IP session records |
| Tcpflow | Extract an ASCII dump of a given TCP session |
| p0f | Operating system fingerprinting |
| tcpdump | Extracts individual sessions from packet logs |
| Wireshark | Packet analysis tool (used to be called Ethereal) |
Contents
Since Sguil is dependant on many other types of software to gather, facilitate, store ,decode and analyze I will be using Xbuntu based distribution Security Onion which saves massive amount of time to set up the entire environment. Security Onion has all this and more build in and is able to quickly configure which software to tie to Sguil.
Setup
To start out I downloaded the disk image for Security Onion from their github page which I Installed on Oracle Virutalbox as a 64 bit Ubuntu operating system, with 4GB of memory and a singe processor. Installation process is very similar to regular GUI Ubuntu installation which I will not delve into in this short introduction.
Dependencies
Examples
Summary
See also
- Sagan
- Intrusion detection system (IDS)
- Intrusion prevention system (IPS)
- Network intrusion detection system (NIDS)
- Metasploit Project
- nmap
References
- Sguil Homepage
- Sguil FAQ
- NSMWiki: The official wiki for the Sguil project.
