Taranis NG

Taranis NG is an OSINT gathering and analysis tool for CSIRT teams and organisations. It allows osint gathering, analysis and reporting; team-to-team collaboration; and contains a user portal for simple self asset management.

Taranis crawls various data sources such as web sites or tweets to gather unstructured news items. These are processed by analysts to create structured report items, which are used to create products such as PDF files, which are finally published.

Taranis supports team-to-team collaboration, and includes a light weight self service asset management which automatically links to the advisories that mention vulnerabilities in the software.

Type	Name	Description
Collector	web	crawl web sites
	twitter	receive tweets
	email	read e-mails
	atom	read atom feeds
	rss	read RSS feeds
	slack	read Slack messages
	manual entry	enter news item manually
	scheduled tasks	populate feed automatically
Presenter	pdf	create a PDF file
	text	create plain text from template
	html	create HTML from template
	misp	create MISP event JSON
Publisher	email	send e-mail
	ftp	upload to FTP
	misp	create MISP event
	twitter	create tweet
	wordpress	publish to WordPress
Bot	analyst	extract attributes from text by regular expressions
	grouping	group similar items in the news feed
	wordlist_updater	update word lists used for matching

This is just a taste of its features:

• crawl the raw data using various collectors, perhaps located in different environments.
• process even those javascript-generated web pages with advanced data extraction techniques
• create different analyses with completely customizable report item types
• generate many different products with help of product templates
• easily publish to different channels
• time is money: collaborate with other teams by sharing interesting data. Each partnership can be configured and customized.
• split the work responsibilities any way you like, or have multiple teams process partially overlapping data using advanced role and permission system
• use wordlists for filtering and highlighting
• publish the self-service asset management portal to your constituency and allow them to set various notification profiles for those times when a vulnerability hits their product.

Hardware requirements: make sure to have at least 2 GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores and 5 GB of disk storage available for running, 20 GB of disk storage if you want to build the project from scratch.

Taranis NG was developed by SK-CERT with a help from wide CSIRT community, and is released under terms of the European Union Public Licence.

Resources: CHANGELOG, LICENSE.

Directory structure

• src/ - Taranis NG source code:
  • Core is the REST API, the central component of Taranis NG
  • GUI is the web user interface
  • Collectors retrieve OSINT information from various sources (such as web, twitter, email, atom, rss, slack, and more) and create news items.
  • Presenters convert report items to products such as PDF.
  • Publishers upload the products to external places such as e-mail, a WordPress web site, etc.
  • Bots are used for automated data processing. Think of them as robotic analysts.
• ansible/ - Playbooks, roles, files and inventory to support easy deployment through Ansible
• docker/ - Support files for Docker image creation and example docker-compose file

Architecture

Getting started with Docker installation

Currently, the best way to deploy is via Docker. For more information, see docker/README.md.

When your Taranis NG instance is up and running, visit your instance by navigating to https://localhost:4443 using your web browser. The default credentials are user / user and admin / admin.

Connecting to collectors, presenters, and publishers

After installation, you have to connect the core application with collectors, presenters, and publishers. There is no limit to how many of these you have. The default docker installation deploys one instance of each for you automatically.

Adding a collector node: TL;DR: no action needed. Longer version: This is done automatically on startup if no collectors are defined, unless you define SKIP_DEFAULT_COLLECTOR=true environment variable. To verify: Log in as an admin, then navigate to Configuration -> Collectors nodes. You should see Default Docker Collector in the list.

Adding a presenter node: Log in as an admin, then navigate to Configuration -> Presenters nodes. Click Add new. Enter any name and description. For URL, enter http://presenters/ and for key, enter supersecret (or whatever password you chose during the installation). Click Save.

Adding a publisher node: repeat the process at Configuration -> Publishers nodes. Fill in the fields. For URL, enter http://publishers/. Don't forget to set the password.

Altering the roles (optional)

If you don't wish to use separate accounts for user and admin, or have other ideas about how the responsibilities should be split, visit Configuration -> Roles. Edit the roles to your liking, for example by adding the executive permissions to the Admin role. If you change the roles to yourself, don't forget to log out and log back in.

Adding sources to collect

Visit Configuration -> OSINT Sources. Click Add new. Select the collectors node that you just created and then you should be able to see all the collectors it has registered. Pick one (for instance the RSS collector), and you will be able to enter all the necessary details. Finally, click Save.

In a few minutes, you should see freshly collected data in the Assess menu, which is normally available to the account user / user.

Splitting the sources into groups, and revisiting the permissions (optional)

Visit Configuration -> OSINT Source Groups to customize the groups, in which the results are being presented. Click Add new, then put the various sources you've created into different groups.

If you want to restrict the access, go to Configuration -> ACLs, and create a new ACL by clicking Add new. You can pick any particular item type (Collector, Delegation, OSINT Source, OSINT Source Group, Product Type, Report Item, Report Item Type, Word List) and then grant see, access, or modify access types to everyone, selected users, or selected roles.

Uploading the CPE, CWE and CVE dictionaries

In order to simplify the process of writing advisories, you can have CPE, CWE dictionaries and a current list of CVEs preloaded in Taranis NG.

1. Download the official CPE dictionary from nvd.nist.gov/products/cpe in gz format.

2. Upload the dictionary to the proper path, and import into the database

zcat official-cpe-dictionary_v2.3.xml.gz | \
    docker exec -i taranis-ng-core-1 python manage.py dictionary --upload-cpe

3. Download the official CVE list from cve.mitre.org/data/downloads/ in xml.gz format.

4. Upload the dictionary to the proper path, and import into the database

zcat allitems.xml.gz | \
    docker exec -i taranis-ng-core-1 python manage.py dictionary --upload-cve

5. Download the official CWE list from cwe.mitre.org/data/downloads.html in xml.zip format.

6. Upload the dictionary to the proper path, and import into the database

zcat cwec_latest.xml.zip | \
    docker exec -i taranis-ng-core-1 python manage.py dictionary --upload-cwe

Some Linux distributions might provide gzcat instead of zcat.

Using the default stop lists for better tag cloud

1. Visit Configuration -> Word Lists.
2. Open the default word lists (starting with Default ...).
3. Choose a word list URL or use the default URL present in the standard installation.
4. Under Words, click Download from URL.
5. Check whether the CSV file has a header or not, then click Download from URL. Choose which column has the value and description.
6. Optionally, you can check Delete existing words option to remove any previous words in the list.
7. Finally, if you are satisfied with the configuration, click Import.
8. The word list will be imported and you can now save it, to be applied.

About...

This project was inspired by Taranis3, a great tool made by NCSC-NL. Currently, NCSC-NL has a new tool for producing advisories, with a different approach to communicating with the world. There was no funding to maintain or further develop NCSC-NL's Taranis3.

It aims to become a next generation of this category of tools. The project was made in collaboration with a wide group of European CSIRT teams who are developers and users of Taranis3, and would not be possible without their valuable input especially during the requirements collection phase. The architecture and design of new Taranis NG is a collective brain child of this community.

This project has been co-funded by European Regional Development Fund as part of Operational Programme Integrated Infrastructure (OPII).

Further development has been co-funded by “Connecting Europe Facility – Cybersecurity Digital Service Infrastructure Maintenance and Evolution of Core Service Platform Cooperation Mechanism for CSIRTs – MeliCERTes Facility” (SMART 2018/1024).

Further development is being co-funded by European Commission through the Connecting Europe Facility action entitled "Joint Threat Analysis Network", action number 2020-EU-IA-0260.

Learn more...

Before the new developer and user documentation becomes available, we invite you to have a look at the Taranis NG - original requirements.pdf for detailed description of the features of the first release, its internal architecture, and general design goals of the project.

Please note that the version available today may already contain new features and changes, which are not documented in the requirements PDF.