Zeek Network Security Monitor v6.0.1 releases: powerful network analysis framework

Zeek Network Security Monitor

Zeek is a powerful framework for network analysis and security monitoring. It is a powerful system that on top of the functionality it provides out of the box, also offers the flexibility to customize analysis pretty much arbitrarily

Bro Network Security Monitor

Feature

  • Adaptable

    Zeek’s domain-specific scripting language enables site-specific monitoring policies.

  • Efficient

    Zeek targets high-performance networks and is used operationally at a variety of large sites.

  • Flexible

    Zeek is not restricted to any particular detection approach and does not rely on traditional signatures.

  • Forensics

    Zeek comprehensively logs what it sees and provides a high-level archive of a network’s activity.

  • 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.

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