• In-depth Analysis

  Zeek comes with analyzers for many protocols, enabling high-level semantic analysis at the application layer.

• Highly Stateful

  Zeek keeps extensive application-layer state about the network it monitors.

• Open Interfaces

  Zeek interfaces with other applications for real-time exchange of information.

• Open Source

  Zeek comes with a BSD license, allowing for free use with virtually no restrictions.

While focusing on network security monitoring, Zeek provides a comprehensive platform for more general network traffic analysis as well. Well-grounded in more than 20 years of research, Zeek has successfully bridged the traditional gap between academia and operations since its inception. Today, it is relied upon operationally by both major companies and numerous many educational and scientific institutions for securing their cyberinfrastructure.

Zeek was originally developed by Vern Paxson. Robin Sommer now leads the project, jointly with a core team of researchers and developers at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA; and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana-Champaign, IL.

Changelog v6.0.1

This release fixes the following security issues:

• File extraction limits were not correctly enforced for files containing large
  amounts of missing bytes. Crafting files with large amounts of missing bytes
  in them could cause Zeek to spend a long time processing data, allocate a lot
  of main memory, and write a lot of data to disk. Due to the possibility of
  receiving these packets from remote hosts, this is a DoS risk. The fix
  included makes Zeek correctly enforce file size limits. We also added a new
  option (default_limit_includes_missing) which allows to customize the behavior
  when encountering large amounts of missed bytes in file. This issue was
  discovered by Luca Cigarini.
• Sessions are sometimes not cleaned up completely within Zeek during shutdown,
  potentially causing a crash when using the -B dpd flag for debug logging. This
  is low priority because it only happens at shutdown and only when using that
  flag. The fix included is to reorder shutdown to cleanup all the sessions
  prior to tearing down the analyzers.
• A specially-crafted HTTP packet can cause Zeek’s filename extraction code to
  take a long time to process the data. Due to the possibility of receiving
  these packets from remote hosts, this is a DoS risk. The fix included adjusts
  the regular expression used in the extract_filename_from_content_disposition()
  script function to more-correctly match the data.
• A specially-crafted series of FTP packets made up of a CWD request followed by
  a large amount of ERPT requests may cause Zeek to spend a long time logging
  the commands. Due to the possibility of receiving these packets from remote
  hosts, this is a DoS risk. The fix included is to prevent logging of pending
  commands for FTP packets.
• A specially-crafted VLAN packet can cause Zeek to overflow memory and
  potentially crash. Due to the possibility of receiving these packets from
  remote hosts, this is a DoS risk. The fix included is to add some additional
  length checking to the VLAN analyzer.

This release fixes the following bugs:

• Fixed a base64 decoding issue with the authorization field of HTTP request
  headers that was sometimes causing Zeek to output error messages. Thank you
  to GitHub user @progmboy for reporting and providing a fix for this issue.
• Ensure that Zeek builds use the internal version of Spicy instead of external
  installations, unless specifically configured for that mode.
• Support was added for switch fields when exporting Spicy types to Zeek.
• A number of fixes were added to protect against potential unbounded state
  growth with the SMB and DCE-RPC analyzers. SMB close requests will properly
  tear down an related DCE-RPC analyzers. A new SMB::max_dce_rpc_analyzers
  script variable was added that allows finer control of how many DCE-RPC
  analyzers are allowed to be created per SMB connection. Thanks to Zeek Slack
  user Takomi Sugawara for reporting this issue.
• Fixed a regression in the UDP and TCP analyzers that was causing more data
  than necessary to be forwarded to the next analyzer in the chain. Thanks to
  Zeek Slack user Hiep Long Tan for reporting this issue.
• A connection’s value is now updated in-place when its directionality is
  flipped due to Zeek’s heuristics (for example, SYN/SYN-ACK reversal or
  protocol specific approaches). Previously, a connection’s value was discarded
  when flipped, including any values set in a new_connection() handler. A
  new connection_flipped() event is added to allow updating custom state in
  script-land.
• Fixed undefined symbols being reported from Spicy when building some of the
  binary packages for Zeek.
• Loading policy/frameworks/notice/community-id.zeek now also automatically
  community ID logging. In the past, loading the script had no effect unless
  policy/protocols/conn/community-id-logging.zeek was loaded before. This
  was fairly unusual and hard to debug behavior.
• Spicy no longer registers an extra port for every port registered in a
  plugin’s .evt file.
• Timeouts in DNS resolution no longer cause uncontrolled memory growth.
• Fix check to skip DNS hostname lookups for notices that are not delivered via
  email in policy/frameworks/notice/extend-email/hostnames. Due to that
  policy script being loaded in the Zeek’s default local.zeek, this
  previously caused unneeded DNS lookups for every generated notice instead of
  just those delivered via email.

Download & Install & Tutorial