Multiple bro nodes

Hi,

I haven’t seen any discussion on this matter yet, while I have heard how bro developers fully utilize bro-ids system.

What’s the good and standard management and maintenance process when one deploy multiple bro-ids nodes in the site? This is tricky, as most of security admins always have their own way of administration, but I would like to know how bro-ids developers such as Vern, Christian or Robin doing it or others who would like to share the idea.

How are the analysis and correlation process that can be done through multiple bro-ids node?

I know bro-ids documentation is improving especially after wiki is launched. But I still hardly find the answer for the questions above. I would like to know how it is done practically.

Thanks.

Hi there,

Hi,

I haven't seen any discussion on this matter yet, while I have heard
how bro developers fully utilize bro-ids system.

What's the good and standard management and maintenance process when
one deploy multiple bro-ids nodes in the site? This is tricky, as most
of security admins always have their own way of administration, but I
would like to know how bro-ids developers such as Vern, Christian or
Robin doing it or others who would like to share the idea.

I'm afraid there really is no definitive answer to this. It depends on
the particular purpose of your distributed installation -- what events
would you like to distribute, how big do you picture your network of Bro
nodes to be, how sensitive are those (do you need to encrypt the
communication), etc.

How are the analysis and correlation process that can be done through
multiple bro-ids node?

All information is exchanged in the form of events. By writing suitable
event handlers, you can perform arbitrary forms of analysis/aggregation/
correlation on the events through the use of state tables and other
typical Bro language features. (Note also that you can define multiple
event handlers per event type, and that there is some meta-information
on events available via built-in functions, such as is_remote_event().)

I know bro-ids documentation is improving especially after wiki is
launched. But I still hardly find the answer for the questions above.
I would like to know how it is done practically.

We're aware that documentation of the Bro communication features is
sorely lacking. We're in the process of wikifying our documentation in
the hope that it'll be easier for us to update it as the need arises. As
always, scarcity of time is the main hurdle. :frowning: The Broccoli manual has
a reasonable level of detail on how to configure communicative setups.

Cheers,
Christian.

There are some notes and ideas regarding inter-bro communication (and
how it can be configured) here:

http://www.nersc.gov/~scottc/

particularly,

http://www.nersc.gov/~scottc/software/bro/broToBro.html

As well, the bro conference presentations have some information
regarding this as well. Soon this will all make it to the wiki...

thanks!

scott

Christian Kreibich wrote: