Agentless System Crawler

Disclaimer:

"The strategy is definitely: first make it work, then make it right, and, finally, make it fast."

The current state of this project is in the middle of "make it right".

Prereqs and Building:

To run the crawler you will need to install python, pip and the python modules specified in the requirements.txt file.

You can build the crawler as a native application or as a containerized application with Docker.

Building Crawler as a Native Application: Do the following steps in the environment in which you want to run the crawler:

 * Install Python 2.7.5+
 * apt-get install python-pip
 * pip install -r requirements.txt

In a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic system, the following steps work to install and run the crawler natively:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python2.7 python-pip
git clone https://github.com/cloudviz/agentless-system-crawler.git
cd agentless-system-crawler/
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Building Crawler as a Container: If you want to run the crawler in a container then build the crawler image using the provided Dockerfile:

sudo docker build -t crawler .

or run:

sudo make build

To run the test cases, run:

sudo make test

Running the Crawler:

Runing the Crawler Natively: To run the crawler natively on the Docker host system, use:

sudo python crawler/crawler.py ...

Runing the Crawler as a Container: To run the crawler in a container use:

sudo docker run \
    --privileged \
    --net=host \
    --pid=host \
    -v /cgroup:/cgroup:ro \
    -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup:ro \
    -v /var/lib/docker:/var/lib/docker:ro \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v $PWD/output:/crawler/output \
    -it crawler ...

Note: this assumes a directory called output is present to store the output of the crawler scans, so you may need to create (mkdir output) first.

The following examples will use CRAWLER as a short-hand notation to mean one of the above commands.

Quick tests:

$ CRAWLER --help Should show the help text.

$ CRAWLER

Should print something like this on stdout:

metadata "metadata" {"since_timestamp":1450194519.0,"features":"os,cpu","timestamp":"2015-12-16T20:27:25-0500","since":"BOOT","namespace":"192.168.1.3","system_type":"vm","compress":false}
os "linux" {"boottime":1450194519.0,"ipaddr":["127.0.0.1","192.168.1.3","192.168.122.1","192.168.123.1","172.17.42.1","9.80.80.71"],"osdistro":"Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation","osname":"Linux-2.6.32-573.8.1.el6.x86_64-x86_64-with-redhat-6.7-Santiago","osplatform":"x86_64","osrelease":"2.6.32-573.8.1.el6.x86_64","ostype":"linux","osversion":"#1 SMP Fri Sep 25 19:24:22 EDT 2015"}
cpu "cpu-0" {"cpu_idle":61.0,"cpu_nice":0.0,"cpu_user":19.5,"cpu_wait":0.0,"cpu_system":19.5,"cpu_interrupt":0.0,"cpu_steal":0.0,"cpu_used":39}

Crawling Containers:

To crawl all containers running on the host use the following command:

$ CRAWLER --crawlmode OUTCONTAINER \
          --url file://output/test.csv \
          --features os,disk,process,connection,metric,package,file,config \
          --logfile output/crawler.log

This will take a snapshot of the existing containers and put the results in a file called output/test.csv.[containerID].[number].

Continuous Container Crawling:

To crawl all containers running on the host use the following command:

$ CRAWLER --crawlmode OUTCONTAINER \
          --url file://output/test.csv \
          --frequency 5 \
          --features os,disk,process,connection,metric,package,file,config \
          --logfile output/crawler.log \
          --numprocesses 8

To test this, start a container:

sudo docker run -d --name=test ubuntu bash -c "while true; do sleep 1; done"

Wait 30 seconds for a snapshot to be taken, then run a secondary command in the container to force some changes:

sudo docker exec test apt-get install -y vim

Wait another 30 seconds for the crawler agent to take another snapshot of the modified container. The snapshots will be stored in output/test.csv.[containerID].[number]. Find 2 snapshot files that was taken before and after vim was installed. In this example, let's assume it is test.csv.9348177d4c8e.4 and test.csv.9348177d4c8e.5. To clearly see the differences between the snapshots, we first need to sort them:

$ cd output
$ sort test.csv.9348177d4c8e.4 -k1,2 > test.csv.9348177d4c8e.4.sorted
$ sort test.csv.9348177d4c8e.5 -k1,2 > test.csv.9348177d4c8e.5.sorted

Now using vimdiff, you can see the 2nd snapshot has a lot of new files added to /usr/share/vim directory due to apt-get install vim

$ vimdiff test.csv.9348177d4c8e.4.sorted test.csv.9348177d4c8e.5.sorted

Finally, delete the test container:

sudo docker rm -f test

In-guest crawling:

We will start crawler agent in manual mode this time instead of periodic mode:

$ CRAWLER --url "file://output/before.csv"  --features os,disk,process,package

Install emacs (or any other package):

$ apt-get install -y emacs

Use crawler to collect information again

$  CRAWLER --url "file://output/after.csv" --features os,disk,process,package

Now we can find the differences before and after:

$ diff output/before.csv.0 output/after.csv.0

You will probably see something similar to this below indicating package emacs is now installed and disk space has shrunk due to installating emacs.

package "emacs" {"installed":null,"pkgname":"emacs","pkgsize":"25","pkgversion":"45.0ubuntu1"}

Adding Additional Metadata to Crawler Output:

Sometimes you might need to add additional information to crawler output to identify the system it is running on, to pass some configuration or environment specific information about the crawled systems. To do this, you can pass extra metadata at crawler invocation using the --extraMetadata option:

--extraMetadata '{"field1": 123, "field2": "abc"}'`

You get this metadata as part of the first line (metadata) output of the crawler:

{"system_type": "host", ..., "field2": "abc", "field1": 123, ...}

Example:

$ CRAWLER --features package --format json --url file://pkg.json

$ CRAWLER --features package --format json --extraMetadata '{"field1": 123, "field2": "abc"}' --url file://pkg_extra.json

$ diff pkg.json.0 pkg_extra.json.0
1c1
< {"system_type": "host", "timestamp": "2018-10-27T02:55:09+0000", "namespace": "10.97.64.69", "features": "package", "uuid": "c32f4f34-9081-4022-afbe-c35dd2031022"}
---
> {"system_type": "host", "field2": "abc", "timestamp": "2018-10-27T03:01:27+0000", "field1": 123, "namespace": "10.97.64.69", "uuid": "715d6351-399c-43b8-9c9f-0f2ed0ce92c5", "features": "package"}

The second document includes the additional fields in its output.