This page outlines customizations and additions that are popular among Zeek users.
Note
This page lists externally-maintained Zeek packages. The Zeek team does not provide support or maintenance for these packages. If you find bugs or have feature requests, please reach out to the respective package maintainers directly.
You may also post in the :slacklink:`Zeek Slack <>` #packages channel or :discourselink:`forum <>` to get help from the broader Zeek community.
.. versionadded:: 6.0
Zeek includes native Community ID Flow Hashing support. This functionality has previously been provided through the zeek-community-id package.
Note
At this point, the external zeek-community-id package is still available to support Zeek deployments running older versions. However, the scripts provided by the package cause conflicts with those provided in Zeek 6.0 - do not load both.
Loading the
:doc:`/scripts/policy/protocols/conn/community-id-logging.zeek`
and
:doc:`/scripts/policy/frameworks/notice/community-id.zeek`
scripts adds an additional community_id
field to the
:zeek:see:`Conn::Info` and :zeek:see:`Notice::Info` record.
$ zeek -r ./traces/get.trace protocols/conn/community-id-logging LogAscii::use_json=T
$ jq < conn.log
{
"ts": 1362692526.869344,
"uid": "CoqLmg1Ds5TE61szq1",
"id.orig_h": "141.142.228.5",
"id.orig_p": 59856,
"id.resp_h": "192.150.187.43",
"id.resp_p": 80,
"proto": "tcp",
...
"community_id": "1:yvyB8h+3dnggTZW0UEITWCst97w="
}
The Community ID Flow Hash of a :zeek:see:`conn_id` instance can be computed with the :zeek:see:`community_id_v1` builtin function directly on the command-line or used in custom scripts.
$ zeek -e 'print community_id_v1([$orig_h=141.142.228.5, $orig_p=59856/tcp, $resp_h=192.150.187.43, $resp_p=80/tcp])'
1:yvyB8h+3dnggTZW0UEITWCst97w=
Zeek supports IP address geolocation as well as AS (autonomous system) lookups. This requires two things:
- Compilation of Zeek with the libmaxminddb library and development headers. If you're using our :ref:`Docker images <docker-images>` or :ref:`binary packages <binary-packages>`, there's nothing to do: they ship with GeoIP support.
- Installation of corresponding MaxMind database files on your system.
To check whether your Zeek supports geolocation, run zeek-config --have-geoip
(available since Zeek 6.2) or simply try an address lookup. The following
indicates that your Zeek lacks support:
$ zeek -e 'lookup_location(1.2.3.4)'
error in <command line>, line 1: Zeek was not configured for GeoIP support (lookup_location(1.2.3.4))
Read on for more details about building Zeek with GeoIP support, and how to configure access to the database files.
If you build Zeek yourself, you need to install libmaxminddb prior to configuring your build.
RPM/RedHat-based Linux:
sudo yum install libmaxminddb-devel
DEB/Debian-based Linux:
sudo apt-get install libmaxminddb-dev
FreeBSD:
sudo pkg install libmaxminddb
Mac OS X:
You need to install from your preferred package management system (e.g. Homebrew, MacPorts, or Fink). For Homebrew, the name of the package that you need is libmaxminddb.
The configure
script's output indicates whether it successfully located
libmaxminddb. If your system's MaxMind library resides in a non-standard path,
you may need to specify it via ./configure --with-geoip=<path>
.
MaxMind's databases ship as individual files that you can download from their website after signing up for an account. Some Linux distributions also offer free databases in their package managers.
There are three types of databases: city-level geolocation, country-level
geolocation, and mapping of IP addresses to autonomous systems (AS number and
organization). Download these and decide on a place to put them on your
file system. If you use automated tooling or system packages for the
installation, that path may be chosen for you, such as /usr/share/GeoIP
.
Zeek provides three ways to configure access to the databases:
- Specifying the path and filenames via script variables. Use the
:zeek:see:`mmdb_dir` variable, unset by default, to point to the directory
containing the database(s). By default Zeek looks for databases called
GeoLite2-City.mmdb
,GeoLite2-Country.mmdb
, andGeoLite2-ASN.mmdb
. Starting with Zeek 6.2 you can adjust these names by redefining the :zeek:see:`mmdb_city_db`, :zeek:see:`mmdb_country_db`, and :zeek:see:`mmdb_asn_db` variables. - Relying on Zeek's pre-configured search paths and filenames. The :zeek:see:`mmdb_dir_fallbacks` variable contains default search paths that Zeek will try in turn when :zeek:see:`mmdb_dir` is not set. Prior to Zeek 6.2 these paths were hardcoded; they're now redefinable. For geolocation, Zeek first attempts the city-level databases due to their greater precision, and falls back to the city-level one. You can adjust the database filenames via :zeek:see:`mmdb_city_db` and related variables, as covered above.
- Opening databases explicitly via scripting. The :zeek:see:`mmdb_open_location_db` and :zeek:see:`mmdb_open_asn_db` functions take full paths to database files. Zeek only ever uses one geolocation and one ASN database, and these loads override any databases previously loaded. These loads can occur at any point.
Two built-in functions provide GeoIP functionality:
function lookup_location(a:addr): geo_location
function lookup_autonomous_system(a:addr): geo_autonomous_system
:zeek:see:`lookup_location` returns a :zeek:see:`geo_location` record with
country/region/etc fields, while :zeek:see:`lookup_autonomous_system` returns a
:zeek:see:`geo_autonomous_system` record indicating the AS number and
organization. Depending on the queried IP address some fields may be
uninitialized, so you should guard access with an a?$b
:ref:`existence test
<record-field-operators>`.
Zeek tests the database files for staleness. If it detects that a database has been updated, it will automatically reload it. Zeek does not automatically add GeoIP intelligence to its logs, but several add-on scripts and packages provide such functionality. These include:
- The :ref:`notice framework <notice-framework>` lets you configure notice types that you'd like to augment with location information. See :zeek:see:`Notice::lookup_location_types` and :zeek:see:`Notice::ACTION_ADD_GEODATA` for details.
- The :doc:`/scripts/policy/protocols/smtp/detect-suspicious-orig.zeek` and :doc:`/scripts/policy/protocols/ssh/geo-data.zeek` policy scripts.
- Several Zeek packages.
Before using the GeoIP functionality it is a good idea to verify that everything is setup correctly. You can quickly check if the GeoIP functionality works by running commands like these:
zeek -e "print lookup_location(8.8.8.8);"
If you see an error message similar to "Failed to open GeoIP location database", then your database configuration is broken. You may need to rename or move your GeoIP database files.
The following shows every FTP connection from hosts in Ohio, US:
event ftp_reply(c: connection, code: count, msg: string, cont_resp: bool)
{
local client = c$id$orig_h;
local loc = lookup_location(client);
if (loc?$region && loc$region == "OH" && loc?$country_code && loc$country_code == "US")
{
local city = loc?$city ? loc$city : "<unknown>";
print fmt("FTP Connection from:%s (%s,%s,%s)", client, city,
loc$region, loc$country_code);
}
}
For exporting logs to Apache Kafka in a streaming fashion, the externally-maintained zeek-kafka package is a popular choice and easy to configure. It relies on librdkafka.
redef Log::default_writer = Log::WRITER_KAFKAWRITER;
redef Kafka::kafka_conf += {
["metadata.broker.list"] = "192.168.0.1:9092"
};
The externally-maintained json-streaming-logs package tailors Zeek
for use with log shippers like Filebeat or fluentd. It configures
additional log files prefixed with json_streaming_
, adds _path
and _write_ts
fields to log records and configures log rotation
appropriately.
If you do not use a logging archive and want to stream all logs away from the system where Zeek is running without leveraging Kafka, this package helps you with that.
Zeek logs connection entries into the conn.log
only upon termination
or due to expiration of inactivity timeouts. Depending on the protocol and
chosen timeout values this can significantly delay the appearance of a log
entry for a given connection. The delay may be up to an hour for lingering
SSH connections or connections where the final FIN or RST packets were missed.
The zeek-long-connections package alleviates this by creating a conn_long.log
log with the same format as conn.log
, but containing entries for connections
that have been existing for configurable intervals.
By default, the first entry for a connection is logged after 10mins. Depending on
the environment, this can be lowered as even a 10 minute delay may be significant
for detection purposes in streaming setup.
For investigation of memory leaks or state-growth issues within Zeek, jemalloc's profiling is invaluable. A package providing a bit support for configuring jemalloc's profiling facilities is zeek-jemalloc-profiling.
Some general information about memory profiling exists in the :ref:`Troubleshooting <troubleshooting>` section.