PCAPOptikon is a project that will provide a web GUI and some REST APIs to analyze arbitrary PCAP files with Suricata IDS.

PCAPOptikon uses Django 1.8 and TastyPie.

Docker is surely the quickest way to get started with PCAPOptikon. You can download it by running:

$ sudo docker pull pdelsante/pcapoptikon

Now, I would suggest you to create a data-only docker container to grant the persistence of MySQL data (pdelsante/pcapoptikon exposes the volume /var/lib/mysql):

$ sudo docker create --name pcapoptikon_data pdelsante/pcapoptikon

Now, a couple other directories that you may want to create locally on your host are:

$ mkdir -p /var/log/pcapoptikon
$ mkdir -p /var/tmp/pcapoptikon

You can then run your docker container this way:

$ sudo docker run -d --name=pcapoptikon --volumes-from=pcapoptikon_data -v=/var/log/pcapoptikon:/var/log -v=/var/tmp/pcapoptikon:/var/tmp -p=8000:8000 pdelsante/pcapoptikon

This command will create a new daemonized docker container, called pcapoptikon, mounting /var/lib/mysql from pcapoptikon_data and mounting /var/log and /var/tmp from the folders you just created on the host. It will also expose the container's port 8000 on localhost, so that you can simply point your browser to: http://localhost:8000/

Default username and password are admin:admin. You will find some useful info on your host's /var/log/pcapoptikon/pcapoptikon_startup.log and in the other log files in the same folder.

Should you own a valid ETPro oinkcode, you can supply it to the startup script that way:

$ sudo docker run -d --name=pcapoptikon --volumes-from=pcapoptikon_data -v=/var/log/pcapoptikon:/var/log -v=/var/tmp/pcapoptikon:/var/tmp -p=8000:8000 pdelsante/pcapoptikon /opt/pcapoptikon/start.sh <your_oinkcode_here>

Please note that, in this last case, you have to specify the docker instance's entry point /opt/pcapoptikon/start.sh yourself.

PCAPOptikon can be very useful when testing your own rules. You can do so by modifying the local.rules file. In this case, I suggest that you mount the whole rules folder as a volume on your local disk, so that you can easily modify them with your favourite editor. As an example:

$ docker run -d --name=pcapoptikon --volumes-from=pcapoptikon_data -v=/var/log/pcapoptikon:/var/log -v=/var/tmp/pcapoptikon:/var/tmp -v=/var/tmp/suricata/rules:/etc/suricata/rules -p=8000:8000 pdelsante/pcapoptikon

This would mount PCAPOptikon's rules dir on your local /var/tmp/suricata/rules dir (please make sure it exists).

To reload the newly modified rules, you can simply restart the whole docker container, but this will also run oinkmaster and download the whole ruleset from scratch. A quicker way is to use the included reload.sh script, that will manage all the necessary daemons for you:

$ docker exec -ti pcapoptikon /opt/pcapoptikon/reload.sh

This script has its own log file inside the container: /var/log/pcapoptikon_reload.log.

Please make sure the following packages are installed:

$ apt-get install mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client libmysqlclient-dev python-dev

PCAPOptikon needs a Suricata instance running on the same host as the rest of the program. Installing it is pretty simple:

$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
$ sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:oisf/suricata-stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install suricata

PCAPOptikon expects to find classification.config and reference under the folder /etc/suricata/rules/ instead than just /etc/suricata/ (which is the default), so please make sure that your /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml contains the following:

classification-file: /etc/suricata/rules/classification.config
reference-file: /etc/suricata/rules/reference.config

It is also recommended that you install oinkmaster (or pulledpork) and configure it as appropriate (rule url, oinkcode, etc).

You may also want to enable the following option in /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml:

- rule-reload: true

Doing so will let Suricata reload the rules whenever you send the process a SIGUSR2 signal, without having to restart it. So, for example, you can run the following:

$ oinkmaster -C /etc/oinkmaster.conf -o /etc/suricata/rules && killall -SIGUSR2 suricata

If you're using the ./start.sh script which comes with PCAPOptikon, it will do that for you.

First of all, this will clone PCAPOptikon in your current working directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/pdelsante/pcapoptikon.git

Please consider using VirtualEnv, especially if you already have other projects running on Django versions other than 1.8. Installing VirtualEnv is extremely easy:

$ sudo pip install virtualenv

Actually, you only need sudo if you're installing virtualenv globally (which I suggest you to do). Now, cd to PCAPOptikon's root directory to create and activate your virtual environment:

$ cd pcapoptikon
$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

That's all. The first command will create a folder named venv, with a copy of the Python executable, pip and some other tools; the second command will activate the virtual environment for you. From now on, every time you run pip install, the requested modules will be installed locally, without touching your global Python environment.

Now make sure that the virtual environment is still active and then install the requirements by running:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Now, use pip to copy the suricatasc module from your system-wide python install:

$ pip install --no-index --find-links=/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/ suricatasc

Now you're ready to install PCAPOptikon itself. First, please create a new empty MySQL database and populate it:

$ mysqladmin create pcapoptikon
$ python manage.py migrate

You are now ready to create a new user by running:

$ python manage.py createsuperuser

Launch the daemon with the following command (from PCAPOptikon's root directory):

$ python manage.py run_daemon

Now, you can run the web GUI with the following:

$ python manage.py runserver

By default, this will run the server on 127.0.0.1:8000 (you will only be able to reach it from localhost). If you wish to reach it from the local network, simply run:

$ python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

or whatever other port you want.

Simply point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ (or whatever ip/port you chose) and enjoy a simple web GUI that lets you submit new tasks and show their results.

PCAPOptikon includes a standard Django admin GUI that will help you manage your tasks (you can delete or modify them from there): http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/

PCAPOptikon also includes a full REST API made with django-tastypie. To access it programatically, it's recommended that you use an API key. You can create one via the Admin GUI (see above).

The API endpoint can be found at http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/?format=json

To list all the pending tasks, just visit: http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/task/?format=json

To view the status of task #1: http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/task/1/?format=json

Making a POST request to http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/task/ will create a new task for you. Please note that the PCAP file you're sending will need to be encoded with base64. An example Python script making a POST request to create a new task is the following:

import base64
import json
import os
import requests


api_url     = "http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/"
api_user    = "<YOUR_API_USER_HERE>"
api_key     = "<YOUR_API_KEY_HERE>"
pcap_file   = "/path/to/dump.pcap"

headers = {
    'Authorization': 'ApiKey {}:{}'.format(api_user, api_key),
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

with open(pcap_file, 'rb') as i:
    payload = {
        'pcap_file': {
            "name": os.path.basename(self.pcap_path),
            "file": base64.b64encode(i.read()),
            "content_type": "application/vnd.tcpdump.pcap",
        }
    }

response = requests.post(
    os.path.join(api_url, 'task/'),
    data=json.dumps(payload),
    headers=headers
)

if response.status_code == 201:
    retrieve_url = response.headers['Location']
    log.debug("Will need to poll URL: {}".format(retrieve_url))

    # Now you can start polling the address specified by retrieve_url
    # to retrieve the results, which will be available in a few seconds.
else:
    # Something went wrong
    raise Exception("Got status code: {}".format(response.status_code))