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balboa is the BAsic Little Book Of Answers. It consumes and indexes observations from passive DNS collection, providing a GraphQL interface to access the aggregated contents of the observations database. We built balboa to handle passive DNS data aggregated from metadata gathered by Suricata.

The API should be suitable for integration into existing multi-source observable integration frameworks. It is possible to produce results in a Common Output Format compatible schema using either a GraphQL API (see below) or a REST API compatible with CIRCL's.

The balboa software...

Building and Installation

$ go get github.com/DCSO/balboa/cmd/balboa
...

This will drop a balboa executable in your Go bin path.

To build the backends:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/DCSO/balboa/backend
$ make
...

This will create a binary executable in the build/ subdirectories of each backends directory.

Dependencies

On Debian, for example, one can satisfy these dependencies with:

% apt install golang-go librocksdb-dev
...

Usage

Configuring feeders

Feeders are used to get observations into the database. They run concurrently and process inputs in the background, making results accessible via the query interface as soon as the resulting upsert transactions have been completed in the database. What feeders are to be created is defined in a YAML configuration file (to be passed via the -f parameter to balboa serve). Example:

feeder:
    - name: AMQP Input
      type: amqp
      url: amqp://guest:guest@localhost:5672
      exchange: [ tdh.pdns ]
      input_format: fever_aggregate
    - name: HTTP Input
      type: http
      listen_host: 127.0.0.1
      listen_port: 8081
      input_format: fever_aggregate
    - name: Socket Input
      type: socket
      path: /tmp/balboa.sock
      input_format: gopassivedns

A balboa instance given this feeder configuration would support the following input options:

All of these feeders accept input simultaneously, there is no distinction made as to where an observation has come from. It is possible to specify multiple feeders of the same type but with different settings as long as their names are unique.

Configuring selectors

Balboa provides a selector engine which can be used to select or filter observations. The selector engine is configured in a YAML file which is provided via the -s parameter to balboa.

Available selector implementations:

Example:

selectors:
  - name: Filter Unwanted TLDs
    type: regex
    mode: filter
    regexp:
      - unwanted_regex.txt
    tags:
      - filtered_tlds
  - name: CobaltStrike Regex
    type: regex
    mode: select
    regexp:
      - cobaltstrike_regex.txt
    ingest:
      - filtered_tlds
    tags:
      - possible_cobaltstrike

This configuration will tag all observations which are not matched by the regular expressions in unwanted_regex.txt with the tag filtered_tlds. All observations which are tagged with filtered_tlds and which match one or more regular expressions in cobaltstrike_regex.txt are tagged with possible_cobaltstrike.

Configuring the database backend

Multiple database backends are supported to store pDNS observations persistently. Each database backend is provided as a self-contained binary (executable). The frontend connects to exactly one database backend. The backend, however, supports multiple client or frontend connections. Each backend can either configure all observations (no tags parameter) or a list of tags (conditional or).

The backend configuration is defined in a YAML file (to be passed via the -b parameter to balboa server). Example:

- name: cobaltstrike
  host: "localhost:4242"
  tags:
    - possible_cobaltstrike
- name: all filtered observations
  host: "localhost:4343"
  tags:
    - filtered_tlds

A balboa instance with this backend configuration will store all events tagged with possible_cobaltstrike to the backend listening on port localhost:4242 and all events tagged with filtered_tlds to the backend on localhost:4343.

Running the backend and frontend services, consuming input

All interaction with the frontend on the command line takes place via the balboa frontend executable. The frontend depends on a backend service, which is usually its own executable. For instance, the RocksDB backend can be started using:

$ balboa-rocksdb -h
`balboa-rocksdb` provides a pdns database backend for `balboa`

Usage: balboa-rocksdb [options]

    -h display help
    -D daemonize (default: off)
    -d <path> path to rocksdb database (default: `/tmp/balboa-rocksdb`)
    -l listen address (default: 127.0.0.1)
    -p listen port (default: 4242)
    -v increase verbosity; can be passed multiple times
    -j thread throttle limit, maximum concurrent connections (default: 64)
    --membudget <memory-in-bytes> rocksdb membudget option (value: 134217728)
    --parallelism <number-of-threads> rocksdb parallelism option (value: 8)
    --max_log_file_size <size> rocksdb log file size option (value: 10485760)
    --max_open_files <number> rocksdb max number of open files (value: 300)
    --keep_log_file_num <number> rocksdb max number of log files (value: 2)
    --database_path <path> same as `-d`
    --version show version thenp exit

$ balboa-rocksdb --database_path /data/pdns -l 127.0.0.1 -p 4242

After starting the backend the balboa frontend can be started as follows:

$ balboa serve -l ''
INFO[0000] starting feeder AMQPInput2
INFO[0000] starting feeder HTTP Input
INFO[0000] accepting submissions on port 8081
INFO[0000] starting feeder Socket Input
INFO[0000] starting feeder Suricata Socket Input
INFO[0000] ConsumeFeed() starting
INFO[0000] serving GraphQL on port 8080
...

After startup, the feeders are free to be used for data ingest. For example, one might do some of the following to test data consumption (assuming the feeders above are used):

Querying the server

The intended main interface for interacting with the server is via GraphQL. For example, the query

query {
  entries(rrname: "test.foobar.de", sensor_id: "abcde", limit: 1) {
    rrname
    rrtype
    rdata
    time_first
    time_last
    sensor_id
    count
  }
}

would return something like

{
  "data": {
    "entries": [
      {
        "rrname": "test.foobar.de",
        "rrtype": "A",
        "rdata": "1.2.3.4",
        "time_first": 1531943211,
        "time_last": 1531949570,
        "sensor_id": "abcde",
        "count": 3
      }
    ]
  }
}

This also works with rdata as the query parameter, but at least one of rrname or rdata must be stated. If there is no sensor_id parameter, then all results will be returned regardless of where the DNS answer was observed. Use the time_first_rfc3339 and time_last_rfc3339 instead of time_first and time_last, respectively, to get human-readable timestamps.

When multiple backends are configured a query will be dispatched to every backend. Accordingly, when an observation is stored in multiple backends, the result to the query will contain duplicates.

Aliases

Sometimes it is interesting to ask for all the domain names that resolve to the same IP address. For this reason, the GraphQL API supports a virtual aliases field that returns all Entries with RRType A or AAAA that share the same address in the Rdata field.

Example:

{
  entries(rrname: "heise.de", rrtype: A) {
    rrname
    rdata
    rrtype
    time_first_rfc3339
    time_last_rfc3339
    aliases {
      rrname
    }
  }
}

{
  "data": {
    "entries": [
      {
        "rrname": "heise.de",
        "rdata": "193.99.144.80",
        "rrtype": "A",
        "time_first_rfc3339": "2018-07-10T08:05:45Z",
        "time_last_rfc3339": "2018-10-18T09:24:38Z",
        "aliases": [
          {
            "rrname": "ct.de"
          },
          {
            "rrname": "ix.de"
          },
          {
            "rrname": "redirector.heise.de"
          },
          {
            "rrname": "www.ix.de"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Bulk queries

There is also a shortcut tool to make 'bulk' querying easier. For example, to get all the information on the hosts in range 1.2.0.0/16 as observed by sensor abcde, one can use:

$ balboa query --sensor abcde 1.2.0.0/16
{"count":6,"time_first":1531943211,"time_last":1531949570,"rrtype":"A","rrname":"test.foobar.de","rdata":"1.2.3.4","sensor_id":"abcde"}
{"count":1,"time_first":1531943215,"time_last":1531949530,"rrtype":"A","rrname":"baz.foobar.de","rdata":"1.2.3.7","sensor_id":"abcde"}

Note that this tool currently only does a lot of concurrent individual queries! To improve performance in these cases it might be worthwhile to allow for range queries on the server side as well in the future.

Other tools

Run balboa without arguments to list available subcommands and get a short description of what they do.

See also README.md in the backend directory.

Author/Contact

Sascha Steinbiss

License

BSD-3-clause