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A package for capturing and analyzing network
flow data and intraflow data, for network research,
forensics, and security monitoring.
Joy is a BSD-licensed libpcap-based software package for extracting data features from live network traffic or packet capture (pcap) files, using a flow-oriented model similar to that of IPFIX or Netflow, and then representing these data features in JSON. It also contains analysis tools that can be applied to these data files. Joy can be used to explore data at scale, especially security and threat-relevant data.
JSON is used in order to make the output easily consumable by data analysis tools. While the JSON output files are somewhat verbose, they are reasonably small, and they respond well to compression.
Joy can be configured to obtain intraflow data, that is, data and information about events that occur within a network flow, including:
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the sequence of lengths and arrival times of IP packets, up to some configurable number of packets.
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the empirical probability distribution of the bytes within the data portion of a flow, and the entropy derived from that value,
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the sequence of lengths and arrival times of TLS records,
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other non-encrypted TLS data, such as the list of offered ciphersuites, the selected ciphersuite, the length of the clientKeyExchange field, and the server certificate strings,
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DNS names, addresses, and TTLs,
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HTTP header elements and the first eight bytes of the HTTP body, and
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the name of the process associated with the flow, for flows originate or terminate on the host on which pcap is running.
Joy is intended for use in security research, forensics, and for the monitoring of (small scale) networks to detect vulnerabilities, threats and other unauthorized or unwanted behavior. Researchers, administrators, penetration testers, and security operations teams can put this information to good use, for the protection of the networks being monitored, and in the case of vulnerabilities, for the benefit of the broader community through improved defensive posture. As with any network monitoring tool, Joy could potentially be misused; do not use it on any network of which you are not the owner or the administrator.
Flow, in positive psychology, is a state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, deep involvement, and joy. This second meaning inspired the choice of name for this software package.
Joy is alpha/beta software; we hope that you use it and benefit from it, but do understand that it is not suitable for production use.
Joy has helped support the research that paved the way for Cisco’s Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA), but it is not directly integrated into any of the Cisco products or services that implement ETA. The classifiers in Joy were trained on a small dataset several years ago, and do not represent the classification methods or performance of ETA. The intent of this feature is to allow network researchers to quickly train and deploy their own classifiers on a subset of the data features that Joy produces. For more information on training your own classifier, see saltUI/README or reach out to joy-users@cisco.com.
This package was written by David McGrew, Blake Anderson, Philip Perricone and Bill Hudson {mcgrew,blaander,phperric,bhudson}@cisco.com of Cisco Systems Advanced Security Research Group (ASRG) and Security and Trust Organization (STO).
Joy has been successfully run and tested on Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Raspbian), Mac OS X and Windows. The system has been built with gcc and GNU make, but it should work with other development environments as well. For Windows builds, see the Windows section below.
First, obtain the package from github, and change to the joy directory.
To configure the package, run "./config" in the main directory:
[joy]$ ./config
Resolve any dependencies that were not automatically found. Once resolved, re-run "./config" to ensure all dependencies were discovered.
To build the package, run "make" in the main directory:
[joy]$ make
This will cause the programs to be compiled, linked, stripped, and copied into the 'bin' directory as appropriate.
Mac OSX 10.11 has more dependencies than 10.10; the OpenSSL header files are needed to build this package. You can install these header files via Mac Ports (https://www.macports.org/install.php) using the command "sudo port install openssl".
Set COMPRESSED_OUTPUT (in src/include/output.h) to 1 for gzip-compressed JSON output. This compile-time option is on by default. If that #define is instead set to 0, then normal JSON will be output. There are many tools that can be used to work with gzip-compressed output, such as zless, gunzip, etc.
The main program for extracting data features from pcap files or live packet captures is the program joy, which occupies the src/ subdirectory. It is copied into the main joy directory after a successful build. It can be run from that directory, or installed so that it will automatically run as a daemon on Linux or Mac OSX.
WINDOWS BUILDS We have tried to make building on Windows as easy as possible. In the joy/win-joy directory there is a visual studio project file. Open the project file with Visual Studio 2015 (we have tested on VS 2013 as well) and it should load up all the defaults and source files required. Currently, the project is only setup to build 64-bit binaries. Once the project file loads, you can execute a "clean" and "build" of the code. All of the dependent libraries and headers files are in the joy/windows directory. Once you have the binary built, the required DLL files that are necessary are located in the joy/windows/64/DLL directory. You can combine these DLL files with your binary to produce a package that can be dropped onto a windows based machine and execute correctly.
Execution of win-joy.exe has been tested on Windows 7, Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012.
First. ensure both bin/joy and bin/unit_test exist by running either
make or make unit_test. Then you can manually run the unit tests:
./test/unit_test
Or the black box tests:
./test/run_tests.py
You may also automatically build the binaries and run the tests in one swoop by executing:
make test
The test programs will indicate success or failure on the command line. Please see test/README.md for more information on blackbox testing.
To understand how joy is configured, read the configuration file "options.cfg". To process a pcap file in offline mode, run
[joy]$ bin/joy [ OPTIONS ] filename [ filename2 ... ]
For instance,
[joy]$ bin/joy bidir=1 output=data.json filename
To run the packet capture in online mode, use the same command form, but have OPTIONS include an interface= command, and omit the filename(s) from the command line. For instance,
[joy]$ sudo bin/joy interface=eth0 bidir=1 output=data.json
There are many command line options, so instead of typing them all onto the command line, you may want to have the program read a configuration file. Such a file comes with the distribution, options.cfg. If you want to change the program defaults (and you probably do, in order to capture exactly the data of interest to you), then make a copy of the configuration file. By making a local copy that has a different name, your configuration will not be clobbered if you update the joy package.
Please see the file analysis/README.
NOTE: THE DEFAULT CONFIGURATION USED BY THE INSTALL SCRIPT WILL PERFORM ONGOING DATA CAPTURE, WHICH WILL RESTART UPON REBOOT. If you do not want an ongoing capture, we suggest that you do not use the install script.
To install the package on your system, you will need to first build it. Run the script install-sh (as root, or using sudo) to install the package.
[joy]$ sudo ./install/install-sh
If you run the script with no arguments, then the default configuration will be installed into the /usr/local/etc/joy directory. To have a different configuration file installed, then use the -c option to the install script:
[joy]$ sudo ./install/install-sh -c full-path-config-file.cfg
You can also configure anonymization of addresses, which requires a file containing the internal subnets. The default file for those subnets is internal.net; you can change the configuration with the -a option. Similarly, you can change the watchfile of IP addresses (using the -w option) or the SSH private key used to have files uploaded via scp (using the -k option). To see the full option description for the installer, run that program with the -h option to see the help or "usage" message.
A man page will be built and installed automatically as part of the package. See the file joy.1, or after the install-sh script has been run, access the man page through "man joy".