sigwood 0.1.1

Hunt for C2 beacons, DNS anomalies, and cloud-account weirdness in your own logs - no SIEM, no agents.

sigwood is a local-first command-line threat-hunting workbench for self-hosters. You point it at the logs you already have - Zeek, Pi-hole/dnsmasq, syslog, CloudTrail - and it tells you what's in them and runs transparent detectors over them: beaconing, suspicious DNS, port scans, rare syslog events, abnormally long connections, and unusual CloudTrail activity. Every run names the technique behind each detector, so you always know whether a finding came from a published algorithm or an honest heuristic.

Not a SIEM. Not an agent. Not magic. Nothing to deploy, no database, no daemon, no account. Install it, point it at a directory of logs, read the output. It runs on the admin's own box, over logs at rest.

Status: early / pre-1.0 (0.1.1). The six detectors below work and are covered by tests, but interfaces may still move before 1.0. Feedback is welcome.

Install · FAQ · Roadmap · Known issues · Schemas

Quick start

pipx install sigwood        # or pip install sigwood in a venv - see Installation

# point at a directory / file directly (the path is the intent)
sigwood ~/zeek-logs
sigwood /var/log/secure

# optionally name a specific detector to run
sigwood syslog /var/log

# orient before you hunt - a fast, factual profile of a single file
sigwood digest /var/log/messages

# or one-time, detection-driven setup - finds your logs and writes a config
sigwood init

# then hunt across everything enabled in your config
sigwood hunt

No config file is required to get started - sigwood <path> works against a directory or a single file. sigwood init just makes it repeatable.

No logs handy? sigwood ships a small synthetic corpus - one compromised host, without any real network data - so you can watch it work before pointing it at your own logs:

git clone https://github.com/helixmap/sigwood
cd sigwood
python demo/gen_corpus.py                  # writes a synthetic corpus; no network calls
sigwood hunt --config=demo/sigwood.toml    # beacons, a DGA burst, and the matching syslog trail

The generated logs live under demo/corpus/ (gitignored). The full walkthrough - including what each detector should surface - is in demo/README.md.

What a hunt looks like

A run opens with a summary banner - what was loaded, and which technique each detector used - then groups findings by detector, rendered as plain text in your terminal (default) or in richer formats such as html. The output below is illustrative; addresses are RFC 5737 documentation space:

Why use sigwood?

• It runs where your logs are. No services, no database, no daemon, no agent to push. pipx install sigwood, point it at a directory, get output. The only setup step that exists at all is optional: sigwood init, and that only writes plain text files under ~/.sigwood/ as a convenience.
• Real methods, made visible. Beaconing is found with an FFT over connection timing; DNS with HDBSCAN clustering over per-query behavior; rare syslog events with drain3 log-templating plus rarity scoring; CloudTrail with a transparent per-principal z-score composite. Every run tells you which technique ran. You can read why something was surfaced - no black box.
• Big-tent ingestion. One tool reads Zeek (NDJSON and TSV, flat or date-partitioned directories), Pi-hole/dnsmasq, flat RFC 3164 syslog (Debian and RHEL/Fedora layouts), and CloudTrail. Rotation and .gz/.bz2/.xz compression are handled transparently.
• Orient before you hunt. sigwood digest FILE reads a log and reports facts about it - time span, top talkers, the shape of the mix - with zero verdicts. Tells you what's there so you know where to point the detectors.
• Filter before analyze. A curated allowlist of known-harmless infrastructure ships on by default and suppresses that noise before any detector sees the data - toggle any list off by name, drop the whole thing with --no-allowlist, or add your own. Your noise floor is yours to set; detectors never know it exists, and every run discloses how much it hid.
• Honest output. Findings carry a severity, the evidence behind the score, and (with -v/-vv) the analyst pivots to chase next. Pick the shape for the job: a report to read (text, html, pdf), a lossless feed to script against (json), or a worklist to triage from (csv).

What it hunts

Detector	Surfaces	Method	Source
beacon	periodic C2-style callbacks	FFT over connection timing	Zeek conn.log
dns	DGA / tunneling / anomalous lookups	HDBSCAN clustering	Zeek dns.log or Pi-hole
syslog	rare events & reboots	drain3 templating + rarity	syslog (flat) or Zeek syslog.log
scan	vertical / horizontal / block / slow port scans	pattern (heuristic)	Zeek conn.log
duration	abnormally long-lived connections	heuristics	Zeek conn.log
aws	per-principal anomalous CloudTrail behavior	statistical (z-score composite)	CloudTrail *.json* (incl. .gz)

dns and syslog each answer one question across two source families - Zeek and Pi-hole for DNS, flat rsyslog and Zeek's own syslog.log for syslog - and adapt to whichever fidelity they're handed.

Run them all (sigwood hunt), select some (sigwood hunt --detect=beacon,dns), or exclude (sigwood hunt --detect='all,!syslog'). Each detector is also its own subcommand: sigwood beacon ~/zeek.

sigwood and RITA / AC-Hunter

If you know RITA (or its commercial sibling AC-Hunter), the beacon-hunting goal will look familiar - both hunt C2 in Zeek logs, and RITA is excellent at it. sigwood differs in conception rather than ambition: there is no database and no import step (it reads Zeek - and Pi-hole, syslog, and CloudTrail - in place), it spans several log families rather than conn/dns alone, it ships an orientation verb (digest) for logs you haven't met yet, and it names the technique behind every finding on the report itself. If you already run RITA against a dedicated Zeek sensor, keep it - sigwood is for the box where the logs already live and the analyst who wants one lightweight tool across all of them.

How a run works

discover & parse  →  allowlist (suppress)  →  detect  →  render

Responsibilities don't bleed across that line. The loader finds files, decompresses, normalizes every connection source to one canonical schema, and absorbs storage variation (TSV vs. NDJSON, flat vs. dated directories, rotation). The allowlist suppresses known-good traffic before analysis. Detectors only analyze - they never open files, read config, or suppress. Output handlers only render. The CLI is the one place that turns an error into an actionable message and owns the exit code.

Because detectors are pure analysis, every one is importable and callable as an ordinary Python function - useful in a notebook when you want to experiment.

Analysis window

Pointed at a directory, an unqualified run looks back over the last default_window (7d out of the box) of that source's own data - the right default for a live log dir you don't want to read in full every time. Pointed at a single file, it reads the whole file. Override either way:

sigwood --since=7d ~/zeek            # last 7 days
sigwood --since=2026-05-01 --until=2026-05-08 ~/zeek
sigwood --days=2-4 ~/zeek            # 2 to 4 days ago
sigwood --all ~/zeek                 # the entire archive

CloudTrail is the one source that opts out of the default window - novelty detection needs full history, so it always loads in full unless you narrow it explicitly.

Times render in your local timezone and are labeled as such. Pass --utc (or set use_utc = true in config) to render in UTC instead - the setting also reads offset-less --since/--until dates and --days day boundaries as UTC, and export's no-timeframe default window follows it. A date with an explicit offset (--since=2026-05-01T09:00+02:00) is always honored as written. json output is always ISO-8601 UTC either way.

Orient before the hunt: digest

sigwood digest /var/log/messages
sigwood digest /var/log/pihole/pihole.log   # a great first move on a Pi-hole box
sigwood digest conn.log dns.log             # several files → several cards

digest content-sniffs each file, routes it to the right summarizer (conn, dns, syslog, cloudtrail), and falls back to a fast byte-profiler - blob - for anything it doesn't recognize. A card is flush-left and factual: the file's time window, line count and size, a scale-anchored histogram, and a handful of plain-language insights ("one client accounts for 71% of queries"). It states facts and superlatives, never verdicts - no "suspicious," no "anomalous." It reads your data before the allowlist, because everything in the file, allowlisted or not, is part of "what's in here." The blob profiler is bounded: it samples a big file rather than reading it, so a one-gigabyte mystery file costs the same as a one-kilobyte one.

Installation

One name everywhere: the PyPI distribution, the command, the import package, and the config section are all sigwood. Requires Python 3.11+.

The recommended install is pipx, which gives sigwood its own isolated environment and puts the command on your PATH - and sidesteps the externally-managed-environment refusal (PEP 668) that a bare pip install hits on Debian 12+, Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 23.04+, and Fedora:

Debian / Raspberry Pi OS / Ubuntu

sudo apt install pipx
pipx ensurepath              # once - then reopen your shell
pipx install sigwood
sigwood --help

Fedora

sudo dnf install pipx
pipx ensurepath
pipx install sigwood
sigwood --help

macOS (Homebrew)

brew install pipx
pipx ensurepath
pipx install sigwood
sigwood --help

Prefer uv? uv tool install sigwood does the same job on any platform uv supports. A plain virtualenv also works (python3 -m venv venv && venv/bin/pip install sigwood; a minimal Debian may need sudo apt install python3-venv first). What to avoid: sudo pip install - it does not bypass PEP 668, and it pollutes the system Python either way. Upgrade with pipx upgrade sigwood (or pip install -U sigwood in your venv).

Optional extras (same spelling under pipx or pip):

pipx install 'sigwood[all]'           # fast + splunk + cloudtrail (recommended)
pipx install 'sigwood[splunk]'        # Splunk exporter
pipx install 'sigwood[cloudtrail]'    # CloudTrail (S3) exporter
pipx install 'sigwood[fast]'          # force fast-hdbscan for DNS clustering
pipx install 'sigwood[hdbscan]'       # stock hdbscan for DNS clustering
pipx install 'sigwood[pdf]'           # PDF reports - opt-in, see note below

A bare install works without a C compiler on the platforms people run this on. On 64-bit machines (x86-64 and aarch64/arm64, including 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS) sigwood installs fast-hdbscan from pure wheels; on 32-bit ARM (armv7l/armv6l) it keeps stock hdbscan from piwheels. The tool names the active clustering backend on every run that includes the dns detector. Expect the first run on a small box to be slow: the scientific stack's cold import plus a one-time numba JIT warm-up can take a couple of minutes on a Raspberry Pi, both cached on disk - every run after is fast. [fast] remains a stable way to force fast-hdbscan, and [hdbscan] installs stock hdbscan (used on 32-bit ARM and available for calibration/testing on 64-bit). If both backends are present, sigwood prefers fast-hdbscan. [pdf] is deliberately separate from [all] because it needs two things: the python package (pip install 'sigwood[pdf]') AND the native text libraries WeasyPrint renders with (Pango, HarfBuzz, fontconfig), which pip can't install. Add those with your platform's package manager - brew install pango on macOS, apt install libpango-1.0-0 (or dnf install pango) on Linux. Every other format works with no extra setup.

From source:

git clone https://github.com/helixmap/sigwood
cd sigwood
python3 -m venv .venv                # Python 3.11+
.venv/bin/pip install -e '.[all]'

Configuration

Configuration is optional - sigwood runs against a path with none. When you want it repeatable, sigwood init looks at the conventional locations on your box, profiles what it finds (which log families, rough size, freshness - reading only enough of a file to recognize its format, never its contents), and writes an annotated config under ~/.sigwood/ (or /etc/sigwood for a system-wide install). Re-run it any time: it offers to merge into an existing config (each prompt shows what you've already set - hit Enter to keep it; merge never clobbers settings you already have) or reset it, and either way it shows a summary of what will change before it writes anything.

Config is loaded from the first of:

1. --config=FILE
2. ~/.sigwood/config.toml
3. /etc/sigwood/config.toml

Everything sigwood owns lives under the hidden ~/.sigwood/ - config, allowlists, exports, reports - so it can't collide with a project directory. A trimmed example:

[sigwood]
detect     = "all"                 # "all" | "dns,beacon" | "all,!syslog"
zeek_dir   = "/var/log/zeek"
syslog_dir = "/var/log"
# pihole_dir     = "/var/log/pihole"
# cloudtrail_dir = "/var/log/cloudtrail"

home_net       = ["10.0.0.0/8", "172.16.0.0/12", "192.168.0.0/16"]
default_window = "7d"              # lookback for a directory; "" or "all" = full
output_format  = "text"           # text | json | csv | html | pdf

Findings print to your terminal by default - keep it pipeable. Set report_dir (or pass --out=PATH) to write report files instead. Every tunable a detector exposes is documented as a commented "engine room" at the bottom of the generated config (you rarely need it), and sigwood <detector> --help lists that command's flags.

Log sources it speaks

• Zeek - conn.log, dns.log, syslog.log, in NDJSON or TSV, from a flat directory or date-partitioned subdirectories. Rotation and gzip/bzip2/xz compression are transparent.
• Pi-hole / dnsmasq - DNS event logs, aggregated per domain for clustering.
• syslog - flat RFC 3164. Discovery is content-sniffed, not filename-matched, so it handles both the Debian convention (syslog, auth.log, kern.log) and the RHEL/Fedora one (extensionless messages, secure, maillog) - and won't mistake dnf.log or a binary like wtmp for a log stream.
• CloudTrail - gzipped JSON event records, read locally or pulled from S3 (below).

The allowlist

sigwood filters before it analyzes: known-harmless traffic is dropped before any detector sees it, so signal isn't buried in plumbing. Two kinds of allowlist file:

• Flat files = suppression. One rule per line - an IP, a CIDR, a :port/proto, or a domain glob/regex. Matching traffic is dropped before any detector runs.
• TOML stanzas = classification. When a detector needs to know what something is (a nameserver, a backup client) rather than whether to drop it.

sigwood ships three curated domain lists, toggled by name:

list	default	covers
common	on	broad internet infrastructure - CDNs, cloud, NTP, certificate validation, public DNS, OS update channels
devices	on	consumer IoT / smart-home phone-home
homelab	off	self-hosted tooling (Splunk, Proxmox, UniFi, …) - opt-in, since suppressing a product you run is a real blind spot

Nothing ad-, tracking-, or destination-specific ships - opinions differ and you may want to see those. sigwood never ships numeric connection suppressions (those depend on your hosts, and shipping them could hide real findings).

Inspect and manage it with the allowlist verb:

sigwood allowlist                 # what's loaded, each list's on/off state and size
sigwood allowlist show common     # the patterns in a list
sigwood allowlist enable homelab  # turn a shipped list on (writes [allowlist.lists])
sigwood allowlist disable common  # …or off
sigwood allowlist copy common     # fork a shipped list into your allowlist.d to edit

Toggles can also be set directly under [allowlist.lists] in your config; the whole allowlist turns off for one run with --no-allowlist or permanently with enabled = false. Every detect run discloses its coverage on the run-summary banner (allowlist: suppressed 1,284 connections (12%) and 312 domains (59%) - the share of loaded rows suppressed, per kind, so a surprising suppression rate is visible at a glance), so suppression is never silent.

Add your own in any domains_* under ~/.sigwood/allowlist.d/ (the shipped domains_user is a starter). Drop-ins are always additive and survive upgrades; to replace a shipped list, disable it and add your own. Drop-ins carry no extension, so a dotted copy like domains_user.bak won't load (the readout nudges you to rename it); to park a retired list quietly, add a trailing ~ or drop the domains_/connections_ prefix. A malformed regex line is skipped with a notice naming its file and line, not a crash, so one typo can't take down a run or silently disable the rest of a list. A bare host IP with no port suppresses all traffic involving that host - powerful but dangerous, and called out as such wherever it appears.

Pulling logs in: exporters

sigwood can fetch logs from external systems to local files, which it then analyzes like any other source - the syslog detector can't tell whether the data came from rsyslog or a Splunk export.

sigwood export splunk            # run the configured "default" query
sigwood export splunk auth       # run the configured named query: "auth"
sigwood export cloudtrail        # pull logs from S3

• Splunk - named SPL queries under [export.splunk.query.<name>]. It's preferred to use the SIGWOOD_SPLUNK_USER / SIGWOOD_SPLUNK_PASS environment variables over plaintext credentials in config, but sigwood will not judge you.
• CloudTrail - pulls gzipped JSON from an S3 prefix. AWS authentication is not handled here: you authenticate your shell, and boto3 resolves the ambient credential chain. sigwood never reads, stores, or prompts for AWS credentials, and warns before a large egress.

Output formats

Choose by what you're doing with the findings - --format=NAME (or set output_format in config):

• text (default) - a grouped, summarized report for the terminal, with a per-detector table of the signals behind each finding.
• html - the same report, with the same per-detector signal tables, as a self-contained styled file you can open in a browser, print, or share. No extra dependencies; dark mode and print styles included.
• pdf - the html report rendered to PDF (one renderer, two outputs). Opt-in: pip install 'sigwood[pdf]', plus the native text libraries (Pango/HarfBuzz/fontconfig
  • see the install note above). A wide report prints landscape, and wide cells wrap rather than clip.
• json - the lossless machine feed: a single object with run_summary and findings, correctly typed for jq or a SIEM, always the full set. Carries a schema_version.
• csv - a remediation worklist: one row per finding with the next-steps, the "why", and empty status/notes columns to track as you knock items down.

text, html, and pdf are reading views - they show the same content and honor -v (the curated "why it scored") and -vv (raw debug: template strings, cluster membership, full evidence). json and csv always carry the full set.

Where it goes. Every text format - including html - prints to stdout by default; redirect or pipe to save (sigwood dns -f=html > report.html). pdf is binary, so it needs a destination: a pipe (-f=pdf > report.pdf) or a file. Set --out=PATH or report_dir to write files; a directory target auto-names sigwood-report_<detector>_<date> (a single detector, else <first>-plusN) and reports the path it wrote. -o=- forces stdout even when report_dir is set.

Building from source & running tests

git clone https://github.com/helixmap/sigwood
cd sigwood
python3 -m venv .venv                # Python 3.11+
.venv/bin/pip install -e '.[dev]'
.venv/bin/python -m pytest

main is kept runnable. Architecture tests cover the boundaries that matter - detector discovery, run planning, loader metadata, allowlist suppression, output registration, and CLI error formatting.

Acknowledgments

sigwood's mathematics-based detection - FFT for beacon periodicity, unsupervised clustering for DNS behavior - was inspired by David Hoelzer's SANS SEC595. The techniques themselves (FFT, HDBSCAN, drain3) are public-domain mathematics and open-source libraries; this implementation is independent and original, and any errors are mine. sigwood is not affiliated with or endorsed by SANS or GIAC.

License

sigwood is licensed under the MIT License.