Security Monitoring Group

Long-term Objectives

Security monitoring is a key component to security. The EGI CSIRT works to provide the EGI, NGI and site security staff with tools and procedures to detect and contain security incidents as well as weaknesses that could lead to a compromise. In doing so, the EGI CSIRT collaborates closely with the sites and NGI, however it does not provide replacements for site and NGI level monitoring. Even though the results developed are primarily ment for EGI, they are designed and developed so that they could be utilised on the site and/or NGI level as well.

The EGI CSIRT strives to collect various information from the infrastructure, even using own probes and sensors or by combining results generated by other systems (e.g., accounting) on different levels of the infrastructure. The data collected will be evaluated based on current needs and risks, and alarms raised accordingly. The security monitoring system will provide both high-level overview to get a quick notion about the infrastructure as well as a sufficient level of details necessary to sort out security issues detected. The system will archive and evaluate history to follow and forecast trends in security.

Security monitoring will also provide mechanisms and tools to assist in incident containment, for example to gather important log records. Information about users' activities will be used to identify last actions performed by a user to e.g. estimate the sites possibly infected. A way of (semi)automated processing of alerts and warnings issued by the EGI security groups will be investigate and possibly developed.

In order to accomplish the objectives, the EGI CSIRT will develop own tools, mainly to grid specific areas and use existing tools if possible and advise on their usage. Developed probes are not intrusive and do not attempt to circumvent any security mechanisms and are not resource intensive. Results collected by these probes are only available to the EGI CSIRT members and communicated to the appropriate site security contacts. We will also provide recommendations and advisories to the sites and NGI as to how to combine existing technologies to provide efficient local security monitoring. When applicable, collaboration will be established with similar groups of NREN CSIRTs. The tools should be seamlessly integrated with common operational mechanisms used routinely by the security and operations.

Information Sources

The primary sources information on CVEs for pakiti are:

Monitoring probes

The results produced by the security monitoring tools are available from the EGI Security dashboard, which records the outputs of the following probes:

  • CRL checks (eu.egi.sec.WN-CRL-ops)
    • Verifies that all CRLs exist and are current
    • ERROR: an out-dated or missing CRL detected
    • WARNING: an CRL is about to expire
  • Dangerous filesystem permissions (eu.egi.sec.WN-Permissions-ops)
    • Detects world-writable files or directories in exported environment. These files can be misused to information leak, tempering with results or even identity thefts.
    • ERROR: writable executables or directory with common commands
  • Vulnerable file permissions (eu.egi.sec.WN-FilePermVulns-ops)
    • Detects vulnerable file permissions as per CVE-2009-4033 (/var/log/acpid), which could lead to privilege escalations.
    • ERROR: Vulnerable file detected
  • Torque vulnerability (eu.egi.sec.WN-Torque-ops)
    • Checks whether torque server that the WN is using has vulnerable options turned on, as per EGI-ADV-20110615-02
    • ERROR: A vulnerable option detected
  • Pakiti client (eu.egi.sec.WN-Pakiti-ops)
    • Reports a list of installed packages to the EGI Pakiti servers. The more detailed information about Pakiti results are available from the Dashboard.
    • Error: Any critical vulnerability detected
    • Warning: Any High-rated vulnerability detected
  • Following probes are reported but will probably be removed (at least temporarily):
    • eu.egi.sec.ARCCE-Jobsubmit-ops
    • eu.egi.sec.CE-JobState-ops
    • eu.egi.sec.CREAMCE-JobSubmit-ops
    • eu.egi.sec.CE-JobSubmit-ops
    • eu.egi.sec.CREAMCE-JobState-ops

Any ERROR state are expected to get fixed within two businnes days. Any WARNINGs must be addressed within a month.

Tasks

Monitoring of security patches using Pakiti

  • finer access control, e.g., based on information from GOC DB
  • Generating statistics and reports
  • Tagging of and notifications (alarms) about severe vulnerabilities
  • Producing OVAL format for EGI advisories (e.g. SVG ones) and their processing
  • Support NGIs in setting a local instances of Pakiti
  • Performance improvements if needed/asked
  • Integration with existing monitoring frameworks (Nagios)
  • Pakiti server verification
  • Integration with dashboards, UI improvements
  • Operation of the EGI Pakiti server at CESNET
  • Simplification of the installation procedure

Security monitoring with Nagios

  • Development of new probes (based on risk analysis and experience with previous incidents)
  • Support for short-lived "dynamic" probes (if needed) (a procedure and template for a quick introduction of new "volatile" probes testing some very particular characteristics, which needs a fast reaction
  • guides, docs for NGIs/sites
  • Support NGIs in setting local instances of CSIRT Nagios
  • operation of the CSIRT Nagios instance at GRNET
  • Handling of results (raising alarms, sending notifications, access control to results, ...)
  • Evaluation of possible integration of security probes with standard Nagios (securing results, ...)
  • Integration with dashboards
  • Evaluation of results from multiple different sources
  • Aggregating security alerts in a single place

Site level tools

  • recommendation for setting up a central syslog server
  • specification of filters for the syslog
  • (semi)automatic processing of EGI security advisories (checking logs for IP addresses, DNs, ...)
  • best practises for log maintenance

Security Dashboard

  • providing a single place to overview current status, history and provide additional details
  • integration with existing EGI dashboards and appropriate frameworks will be evaluated

Persons

Coordinator