dawgmon 1.1

Monitor operating system changes and analyze introduced attack surface when installing software

dawgmon - Dawg the Hallway Monitor

SUMMARY

The name of this tool is based upon an episode (season 10, episode 10) of South
Park in which Cartman is Dawg the Hallway Monitor patrolling the hallways of
his school.  It's a tool which helps one to monitor changes which have taken
place on a Linux-based system since the previous time the tool was ran. 

One way to use it is to use something like the included sample cronjob to run
dawgmon on a regular interval and email the results to the system
administrator. This can help with identifying machines upon which nefarious
things are happening and monitor who's installing what and where. Please note
that any serious kernel backdoor will easily be able to hide itself from this
tool and as such it's just one added tool in one's toolkit but it should not
relied upon for full security monitoring of Linux machines. It's just one extra
option in one's toolbox.

The other way it's useful is by generating a baseline before installing a piece
of software. Then after installing this piece of software one will run the tool
again and then it's easy to see which changes were made on the system. An
example after establishing a baseline and then installing virtualbox on a
machine might yield something like this:

# ./dawgmon -gfA
1 change detected (0 warnings)            
+ systemd property NNames changed from 259 to 261
# apt install virtualbox-5.1
[...]
# ./dawgmon -gfA
33 changes detected (0 warnings)          
+ size of file /etc/group changed from 937 to 954
+ file /etc/group got modified on 2017-09-14 19:29:51.804811 +0200
+ size of file /etc/group- changed from 934 to 937
+ file /etc/group- got modified on 2017-09-14 19:29:14.000000 +0200
+ file /etc/gshadow got modified on 2017-09-14 19:29:51.812811 +0200
+ size of file /etc/gshadow- changed from 777 to 794
+ size of file /etc/mailcap changed from 40777 to 41063
+ file /etc/mailcap got modified on 2017-09-14 19:29:51.632812 +0200
+ file /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxautostart-service.service got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=lrwxrwxrwx, size=49)
+ file /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxballoonctrl-service.service got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=lrwxrwxrwx, size=51)
+ file /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxdrv.service got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=lrwxrwxrwx, size=35)
+ file /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxweb-service.service got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=lrwxrwxrwx, size=43)
+ file /etc/udev/rules.d/60-vboxdrv.rules got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=-rw-r--r--, size=747)
+ group vboxusers added
+ package virtualbox-5.1 is to be installed
+ suid binary /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxHeadless got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=-r-s--x--x, size=158304)
+ suid binary /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxNetAdpCtl got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=-r-s--x--x, size=23144)
+ suid binary /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxNetDHCP got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=-r-s--x--x, size=158304)
+ suid binary /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxNetNAT got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=-r-s--x--x, size=158304)
+ suid binary /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxSDL got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=-r-s--x--x, size=158296)
+ suid binary /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxVolInfo got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=-r-s--x--x, size=10472)
+ suid binary /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox got created (owner=root, group=root, perm=-r-s--x--x, size=158304)
+ i-node for listening UNIX socket /run/systemd/private changed from 3428734 to 3452848
+ systemd property NInstalledJobs changed from 8392199 to 3238035463
+ systemd property NNames changed from 261 to 263
+ systemd unit file vboxautostart-service.service added
+ systemd unit file vboxballoonctrl-service.service added
+ systemd unit file vboxdrv.service added
+ systemd unit file vboxweb-service.service added
+ systemd unit 'vboxautostart-service.service' added
+ systemd unit 'vboxballoonctrl-service.service' added
+ systemd unit 'vboxdrv.service' added
+ systemd unit 'vboxweb-service.service' added

The above helps with now doing a thorough security review of virtualbox. The
installed suid binaries are obvious points of entry and the run services are
interesting.

Another example run which correctly detects TCP ports opening and closing:

# ./dawgmon -gfA
0 changes detected (0 warnings)           
# nc -l -p 4455 &
[1] 12489
# ./dawgmon -gfA
1 change detected (0 warnings)            
+ port 4455 tcp opened
# fg
nc -l -p 4455
^C
# ./dawgmon -gfA
1 change detected (0 warnings)            
+ port 4455 tcp closed
# 

The tool is not meant for complete accuracy. There are very serious
recommendations normally to not rely on the output of GNU core-utils such as ls
for tool input. In other words; one should rarely build tools to parse and rely
on this type of output as it can change all the time. Realistically the output
of these tools is relatively stable as a lot of people and automatic tools
already rely on their outputs for all kinds of purposes.

However the tradeoff for dawgmon is the following; we would need to implement a
lot of logic to do file system monitoring ourselves, build complex binaries
that include libraries to do the parsing and monitoring of block devices, the
network interfaces and what not more. This will also make the tool way more
complex and less maintainable. On projects right now one can add a new command
including change detection in very little time as the main dawgmon tool already
takes care of caching, executing the command and then supplying the previous
and current output when running a comparision to a command implementation. This
means that on time-constrained projects one can very quickly add a new command
and run analysises including those new commands.

A command can be added by simply inheriting from the Command class. This class
is defined in commands/__init__.py. That file contains also the master list of
commands (and the order in which they're executed when doing a full analysis).
Then the properties like 'name', 'shell', 'command' and 'desc' will have to be
set and two methods 'parse()' and 'compare()' will have to be implemented.
Enough commands are included to get a good idea on how to implement and add new
ones. 


USAGE

For best results run the tool as root. For help type -h/--help and for version
information type -v/--version.

A main action will always have to be specified. These actions are:
-A: analyze the system
-C: compare cache entries
-E: list available commands
-L: list cache entries

# runs an analysis
dawgmon -A

# runs an analysis but only with a few commands
dawgmon -A -e list_suids -e list_tcpudp_ports

# shows the list of available commands
dawgmon -E

# shows available cache entries for comparison
dawgmon -L

# compare old cache entry 3 with new cache entry 5
dawgmon -C 3 5

Further options to help with the analysis are:

-d: show debug output
-e: execute a specific command (can be used multiple times)
-f: force a run without warning about running as root
-g: colorize the output
-l: location of the database cache to use
-m: maximum amount of cache entries to allow in cache (if cache has more
entries than this amount it will truncate the database) 
-t: do not output timestamp information per detected anomaly.

For more usage information run the tool with -h.


LIMITATIONS

The tool parses output of commandline tools and relies on GNU core-utils
specific options for some of it.  There's no specific reason why this tool and
the command implementations cannot be quickly ported to other operating systems
such as the BSD's but right now no Operating System detection is taking place
nor is there a classification of commands based on Operating System support
being done. That would have to be implemented first.

Regarding the finding of pipes, UNIX sockets, files in /boot, /etc and more one
should note that the usage of -xdev passed to 'find' means that not all
filesystems mounted under the start directory will be traversed. This means
that for example /boot will be properly scanned but /boot/efi might not be.
Some smarter approach will have to be used here in the future.

The timestamps when doing a current analysis might be a bit confusing. By
default a timestamp for a warning, normal or debug anomaly message will be the
timestamp of its generation time (as can be seen in commands/__init__.py). The
anomalies are generated after a full commandline scan has been done. So the
output upon which this detection works was generated earlier and subsequently
the timestamps for individual anomalies show a time after the time of the scan.
When comparing cache entries the timestamp of the scan is being used to output
the time at which the detection happend as that makes logically simply more
sense.


ABOUT

All rights reserved. Copyright (C) 2017-2019 by Anvil Ventures Inc.
For licensing information see LICENSE.
For more information contact Vincent Berg <[e-mail]>

To find updated source code or to contribute patches go to the following URL:
https://github.com/anvilventures/dawgmon/