Category: TheHive

New TheHive 3.4 Patch Releases

Last month (that should be… April… we are kinda losing track of time during the confinement), we made silently 2 patch releases for TheHive 3.4, our current stable version even if we have our hands full of soap and bleach as we are working on the eagerly awaited TheHive 4.0.0 final release: 3.4.1, shortly followed by 3.4.2. Your lovely bees are truly committed at keeping TheHive 3 branch buzzing well after 4.0.0 is out.

As usual, we’d like to start by thank the community for bringing the issues they discover to our attention. This is definitely one of the best contributions that we can get from you!

A simple way to help any open source project

3.4.1 Release

Released on April 25, 2020, 3.4.1 mainly fixed some docker-related issues as well as problems with OAuth2 and MISP integration, in addition to a few bugs, as described in the changelog.

Implemented Enhancements

  • Docker: TheHive fails to connect to Elasticsearch (NoNodeAvailableException) #854
  • Improved support for OpenID connect and OAuth2 #1110
  • TheHive’s Docker entrypoint logs the Play secret key at startup (… looking elsewhere hoping not to attract too much attention on this one) #1177
  • Configure TheHive’s first run using Docker Compose #1199
  • TheHive’s docker containers should be orchestration-ready #1204
  • MISP synchronisation: any attribute having the to_ids flag will be imported as ioc by TheHive. In the same way, when you export a case to MISP, observables which have the ioc flag on will become MISP attributes for which to_ids is true #1273

Closed Issues

  • Include Dockerfile in root of project #1222
  • Docker user daemon with id 1 causes permission issues with local #1227

Fixed Bugs

  • Fix MISP sync issues related to Docker #866
  • Owner is case-sensitive on API calls and should be lowercased #928
  • Bug: Observable without data breaks display of observables #1080
  • Docker-Compose Elasticsearch incompatibility #1140
  • Analyzers that take more than 10 minutes run into timeout #1156
  • TheHive 3.4.0 migration log errors ([error] m.Migration – Failed to create dashboard) #1202
  • Computed metrics are not compatible with the painless scripting language #1210
  • OAuth2 Bearer header should be of the format “Authorization Bearer” ? #1228
  • Health API endpoint returns warning when everything is OK #1233
  • Job submission sometimes fails when there are multiple Cortex servers #1272

3.4.2 Release

3.4.1 introduced a regression which was spotted few hours after it has been made public. 3.4.2 fixes t the problem.

It also adds a quick improvement allowing users to have access to error messages returned by Cortex Responder calls.

Display of a failed responder jobs, in case details page

Implemented Enhancements

  • Providing output details for Responders #962

Fixed Bugs

  • File observables in alert are not created in case #1292
  • Analyzer’s artifacts tags and message are not kept when importing observables #1285

Running Into Trouble?

Shall you encounter any difficulty, please join our  user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We will be more than happy to help as usual!

TheHive 4.0-RC2, Fresh out of the Oven

Shortly after the release of TheHive 4.0 RC-1 in February 2020, many members of our community tested it and provided great feedback, spotting issues here and there. We would like to wholeheartedly thank all of those who, like us, want to make TheHive 4.0 a great, rock-solid release!

We are now happy to unveil the 2nd release candidate. It fixes many bugs and introduce – or reintroduce – some new (and old) features :-). In this blog post, we will concentrate on the following features:

  • 2FA
  • Age of cases
  • Reintroduction of webhooks

Please read the changelog for a more comprehensive view, including bugfixes.

And since the COVID-19 crisis is here to stay for quite some time, we don’t want you to rediscover boredom, a dreadful feeling long forgotten thanks to the continued stream of notifications, solicitations and attention-grabbing, 280 chars ‘thoughts’. So instead of getting bored, we invite you to test TheHive 4.0-RC2 to the best extent possible and, should you encounter any issue, please let us know. We want to issue the final release during the summer so that everyone can have it just in time for their forthcoming vacations at home!

2FA

Two factor authentication was initially scheduled for the final release. We changed our minds and decided to offer you the possibility to test this feature right away to gather your feedback and improvement ideas before we finish up baking the final recipe.

Users can enable 2FA from their account. To enable it, first go to your account Settings and check Enable Multi-Factor Authentication.

Once done, you are invited to use your preferred TOTP application (Google Authenticator, Authy, Microsoft Authenticator etc.) to scan the QR code or the code underneath it. Your 2FA will generate A TOTP that you should supply in the MFA Code area. If it is valid, 2FA will be activated.

Important notes:

  1. If a user loses access to their TOTP application, only an administrator can restore access to their account.
  2. If an org administrator loses access to their TOTP application and they are the only administrator for that org, only a super admin can restore access to their account.
  3. If a super admin loses access to their TOTP application and they are the only super admin of the instance, they should pack up their things and look for another job. That or use a magic DB command to restore access to their account. We’ll update the documentation accordingly.
  4. The current implementation of 2FA does not support backup codes or alternate authentication methods should a user loses access to their TOTP application. However, we are considering adding backup codes to the final release.
  5. 2FA cannot be enforced by default for all users at this stage. It is thus of rather marginal value. However, an org admin can see from the UI who did not activate it and pester them until they do. In the same way, a super admin can do the same for org admins, other super admins and mere users. We are updating the documentation to add an API query that will allow you to list all users who did not activate 2FA.
  6. We will consider making 2FA mandatory in TheHive 4.1.
2FA configuration view

Next time you log in, you will need to supply the TOTP verification code in addition to your login and password.

TOTP verification code required at login

Age of Cases

A new information regarding case duration has been added in the list of cases and in case view, so you can easily keep an eye on how old your cases are and activate your escalation procedures etc. if necessary.

Age of Cases in list view
Age of a Case in Case view

Webhooks are back!

TheHive 4.0-RC1 was released without webhooks. They have been reintroduced in this version. You can now configure TheHive 4.0 to use them, but also filter data sent to the remote server by Organisation.

How to report issues

Please open an issue on GitHub using the template made for TheHive4 if you’d like to report a bug on this version. We will monitor those closely and respond accordingly.

TheHive 4 is Here, Finally!

We have been speaking about it for almost two years.

We have been making it for more than twelve months.

And the day finally came for TheHive 4, our latest and greatest version, to be unleashed! The Chefs behind TheHive Project’s Code Kitchen are very happy to announce the immediate availability of TheHive 4.0, Release Candidate 1 (or 4.0-RC1 or the cool geeks call it).

Source: Berserk, écranlarge

Please note that a release candidate is not considered stable and must not be used in production. And since we almost rewrote TheHive from the ground up to accommodate all the nifty features outlined in a previous blog post, not to mention a few others we will cover in the upcoming weeks, we strongly recommend to take it for a spin on a test environment and help us uncover and fix bugs so we can release a stable version by April or May 2020.

Hmmm… I’d Rather Wait for a Stable Version

That’s your right but please don’t complain that, once released, the stable version is so buggy that it crashed your entire SOC operation and drove down the valuation of cryptocurrencies.

OK, OK… You Convinced Me. Where Should I Start?

Good! Well first things first. At this time, we produced documentation in kind of a rush while minding bazillion other things at the same time. We still need to proof-read it and enhance it.

If you are a seasoned TheHive user/contributor and you know what you are doing, please start with the installation guides for Debian or RedHat like operating systems. Then read the Quick start guide.

Noob warning: if you are completely new to TheHive, please use the latest stable version (3.4). TheHive 4.0-RC1 adds non-negligible complexity to accommodate advanced features such as RBAC and multi-tenancy and we will be very busy taking feedback from the intermediate/advanced users of our platform to make sure the stable version is rock-solid before we can recommend it to beginners.

You can find all the documentation we manage to write (more is coming) in the dedicated TheHive4 area of TheHiveDocs repository:

I’ve Just Tried it and Webhooks are Missing!

Nice catch Eagle Eye! Indeed webhooks have not been integrated in RC1. They will make a reappearance in a future RC, before the stable release. We have integrated them into a new notification system that is almost finished but still needs some elbow grease.

But Are you Going to Maintain TheHive 3.4.x when 4.0 will be Released?

You should know that bees will never let you down unless you gas them with pesticides (i.e. non-constructive feedback) and exigences (don’t forget that this is FOSS and we try to do the best we can, right?). So TheHive 3.4.x is scheduled to be maintained around two years after the release of 4.0 as a stable version, unless Elasticsearch 6.x is EOL’ed before that. In which case, we will have no choice but phase out 3.4.x (moving to ES 7+ will require a lot of work that we can put elsewhere).

Help!!! TheHive 4.0-RC1 Does not Work!

Please open an issue on GitHub using the template made for TheHive4 if you’d like to report a bug on this version. We will monitor those closely and respond accordingly.

Correction: March 3, 2020 
A new section regarding webhooks was added. In addition, a few typos were corrected.

Under the Mighty Hood of TheHive 4

We have been speaking about it for almost two years. We have been making it for more than twelve months. And the day (or rather the month in this case) has almost come for TheHive 4, our latest and greatest version, to be unleashed.

While the first release candidate should be published by the end of this month, we would like to cover some of the most important changes we introduced in a platform which we rewrote almost from the ground up (40,000 lines of Scala code and counting), while keeping the familiar look&feel our longtime users came to expect.In a previous blog post, we covered TheHiveFS, a nifty feature of TheHive4 that allows you to quickly access all files stored in TheHive directly from your investigation machine. It’s time now to get a look under the hood of THeHive 4.

My Time is Precious. TL;DR Please

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Here you go then!

The Hive 4’s Brand New Architecture

I am Puzzled, can you Elaborate a Bit?

So, you are not in a hurry anymore? Fine. Here, grab a seat, a glass of Gevrey-Chambertin and tasty Burgundy snails. All set? Let’s start then!

TheHive 4 will be the first version to use a graph database instead of Elasticsearch. Yes, you read that correctly. TheHive 4 won’t support Elasticsearch anymore but fear not fearless cyberdefender. Your friendly bees will not leave you hanging. If you are already using TheHive 3.4.x, we will provide a migration tool that will move your existing data to the new storage system (with no losses or bit flips hopefully).

We haven’t decided to ditch Elasticsearch on a whim or because Thomas (Franco, not Chopitea nor the General) dropped his leftist hipster attitude for a tight, tailor-made dictator uniform straight out of Spain. For all its greatness, ES has some annoying limitations which prevented us from adding, in an elegant, haiku-like way important features such as multi-tenancy, RBAC and large file management, while laying the ground for the future (stop being curious, the future has not been invented yet and when we do invent it, we’ll let you know).

Using JanusGraph, TheHive 4 structures information in graphs and stores them in an Apache Cassandra database. All the files that you attach to task logs or add as observables are stored in a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

Thanks to this brand new architecture, TheHive 4 is horizontally scalable. You can add as many TheHive, Cassandra and HDFS nodes to your Security Incident Response Platform cluster and sustain whatever load you might be facing without a sweat. Who said FOSS can’t be ‘enterprise grade’ (whatever that means in marketing lingo)?

A Tour d’Horizon of the Main Features

TheHive 4, boosted by all the passion and skills of Zen Master Franco and MC Adouani, will support, in addition to TheHiveFS:

  • Multi-tenancy
  • RBAC
  • 2FA
  • Web configuration
  • API versioning

We will cover some of these features in greater detail in future instalments. In the meantime, let’s take a ride in a helicopter and view the wonderful landscape laying before us from above. After you Messieurs-Dames, we are French gentlemen and gallantry is of the essence (except when we use the public transportation in Paris, then savages we become).

Multi-Tenancy

As in Cortex, you will be able to create multiple organisations within a single instance of TheHive 4. In addition, an organisation can decide to share a case or parts of it (say a task, some observables, etc.) with other organisations. That way, a peer organisation or a constituent can contribute to the investigation at hand, provide essential information, etc.

RBAC

TheHive 4 supports a large set of user permissions. Some pertain to administrators, others to users and there are also permissions that apply to connectors. For example, users can manage tasks but not observables. They can have the power to share a case or part of it with sister organisations and execute Cortex analyzers but not responders.

You will be able to create roles for users, and, at the organisational level, what we call shares. RBAC deserves its own blog post and we’ll get to it pretty soon.

2FA

Do you really want us to describe this one? Before you answer yes, we’d like to remind you that you are in a helicopter. Just sayin’.

‘They asked me to explain 2FA. So I helped them out of the helicopter. It was flying way above ground.’
Source: Berserk, FNAC.com

Web Configuration

Tired of using vi, Emacs or your favourite CLI editor for making configuration changes to TheHive’s application.conf? Tired of restarting the service to take into account those modifications? Then you will certainly go dance kizomba with Nabil all night long when we tell you that you don’t need to use vi & service (or whatever the kids are using these days) anymore!

Thanks to the new architecture, all the configuration will be stored in the underlying database and you will be able to edit it using the WebUI. TheHive will automatically take the changes into account and you won’t need to restart it.

We can feel your love here. Merci !

API Versioning

TheHive 4 adds API versioning and it will maintain backward compatibility with TheHive 3.4.x without preventing us from adding new features. TheHive4py will not be updated right away for TheHive 4 but thanks to the backward API compatibility, all existing feeders and programs that use the current version of TheHive4py will still work out of the box.

That’s all folks! Stay tuned for further news and, in the meantime, don’t be blue cuz’ the bees gonna take care of you.

TheHiveFS

TheHive Project’s Code Chefs, sweating under their toques, are working hard to deliver TheHive 4 as soon as feasible. The current target release date for the 1st release candidate (4.0-RC1) is Friday Feb 28, 2020.

While TheHive 4 will be the first release to support graph databases, multi-tenancy and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), it will also have a nifty feature that can simplify the incident response and digital forensics workflows of our fellow cyberdefenders: TheHiveFS.

What is TheHiveFS?

Starting from TheHive 4, TheHive can be ‘mounted’ as a remote, WebDAV filesystem. The filesystem can be securely mounted if SSL/TLS is enabled.

Thanks to TheHiveFS, you can quickly access all files stored in TheHive directly from your investigation machine. This can speed up the time needed to triage and analyse evidence. 

What Types of Files Can I Access through TheHiveFS?

You can access, in read-only mode, all files attached to task logs and all observables which datatype is file, as long as you are allowed to do so. Indeed, TheHive 4 comes with RBAC so if, for example, you are not allowed to view a case or some file observables in a case, you won’t be able to access them using TheHiveFS, the same way as if you are using the WebUI.

Screenshot showing an analyst accessing file observables and files associated to tasks of case #40 using TheHiveFS

How Can I Mount TheHiveFS?

Assuming you have a WebDAV client, such as davfs2, use the following command line:

$ sudo mount -t davfs -o noexec https://myhiveinstance:9001/fs /mnt/dav/

You can also point your graphical file manager to:

dav(s)://myhiveinstance:9001/fs

You will need to authenticate using your username and password as if you were connecting to TheHive’s WebUI.

Mom, I’ve Just Stepped on a Landmine

Beware folks. When you download a file observable using TheHive’s WebUI, it will conveniently create a password-protected ZIP archive before handing you the file. This way, we avoid accidental double clicks that may lead to the infection and compromise of your workstation, which might reflect bad on you or force you to offer breakfast the next morning to all your fellow teammates.

There is no such protection if you use TheHiveFS. Let us repeat this so it sinks: there is no such protection if you use TheHiveFS.

If you mount TheHive’s filesystem and open by accident or by a great deal of will, as a true, hardcore fan of Russian roulette, a file observable that is in fact malware courtesy of your favourite bear, kitten, panda or eagle, you can’t blame your friendly bees. But we will empathise (and our empathy level is directly correlated to the amount of pains au chocolat you send our way).

You’ve been warned.

That Sounds Awesome! When Can I Try It?

As written above, you will be able to try TheHiveFS as soon as TheHive 4.0-RC1 is released and that’s currently planned for the end of February 2020.

You can cry, beg, try to bribe us with VC money, make the line at 3:00 AM in front of TheHive Store (there ain’t no such store, we are not Apple), this will not make us work any faster. But you can always cheer us up, hug us or just thank us. This means a lot to us and to the free, open source software flame we carry deep within our souls.

One More Thing…

While we aren’t Apple, we can mimic Steve to share one more information that will make TheHiveFS even more interesting by Q3-Q4 2020. We plan to add support for large file management in TheHive 4.1, the next major version after 4.0 as would Captain Obvious say. Thanks to this feature, you will be able to upload memory and disk images to TheHive and if your Internet line breaks, the upload will resume automatically. 

That’s all folks!

TheHive 3.4.0 & Cortex 3.0.0 Released

For many months, we have been concentrating our efforts on TheHive 4, the next major version of your favourite Security Incident Response Platform, which we’ll finally provide RBAC (or multi-tenancy if you prefer), a feature that Cortex had for quite some time now.

Source : dilbert.com © Scott Adams

As you well know, both TheHive and Cortex rely on Elasticsearch (ES) for storage. The choice of ES made sense in the beginning of the project but as we added additional features and had new ideas to give you the best experience possible, we faced several ES quirks and shortcomings that proved challenging if not outright blocking for making our roadmap a reality, including RBAC implementation in TheHive, a far more complex endeavour than RBAC in Cortex. Transitioning from ES to graph databases was necessary and since we want our existing users to have a smooth migration path, TheHive 4 (the first release candidate should come out of the oven by the end of the year) will support both ES and graph databases.

But while we were focusing on that, we completely lost sight of the end of life of ES 5.6 so we wrote an apology to you, our dear users, back in May.

Shortly after, we released TheHive 3.4.0-RC1, to add support for ES 6 (with all the breaking changes it has introduced). We also did the same for Cortex with the release of Cortex 3.0.0-RC3. We also took that opportunity to clear out some AngularJS technodebt we had.

We then asked you to take them for a spin and report back any bugs you find given that both versions had to support ES 5.6 and ES 6 to allow for proper migration.

After a few rounds of release candidates, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of TheHive 3.4.0 and Cortex 3.0.0 as stable releases.

Before upgrading your existing software to these new versions, please make sure to read the blog post we wrote back in June. We invite you to pay great attention to the regressions that we were forced to introduce because of ES 6.

You should also note that, in addition to ES 6 support, Cortex 3.0.0 supports fully dockerised analyzers and responders. We’ll elaborate on this in a future blog post soon.

Changelogs

If you are interested in some nitty-gritty details, we invite you to read the relevant changelogs since our last post on the subject:

Running Into Trouble?

Shall you encounter any difficulty, please join our  user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We will be more than happy to help as usual!

DigitalShadows Feeder 2.4.5

DigitalShadows2TH 2.4.5, a new version of the DigitalShadows feeder for TheHive, has been released with major improvements.

Source : https://www.bustle.com

Dockerise All The Things!

The most notable one is that you can now use it with docker. Run docker pull thehiveproject/ds2th and create a homedir for configuration and logs.

$ DS2TH_HOMEDIR = /opt/thehive_feeders/Digitalshadows2TH/
$ docker pull thehiveproject/ds2th:latest
$ mkdir -p $DS2TH_HOMEDIR/{config,log}
$ wget -O $DS2TH_HOMEDIR/config/config.py\
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheHive-Project/DigitalShadows2TH/master/config.py.template

Edit the config.py before runing the docker command below: 

$ docker run --rm --net=host --mount\
type=bind,source="$DS2TH_HOMEDIR"/config,target=/app/config --mount type=bind,source="$DS2TH_HOMEDIR"/log,target=/app/log certbdf/ds2th <OPTIONS>
Quick Installation

If that sounds still complicated, worry not! We also wrote a little program that helps you prepare the environment and install everything. We ensured that it works well on Ubuntu 18.04. The program uses two environment variables to set up everything: FEEDERS_SYSACCOUNT and FEEDERS_HOMEDIR : 

$ export FEEDERS_SYSACCOUNT=thehive
$ export FEEDERS_HOMEDIR=/opt/thehive_feeders

There are also sane, default settings in case you did not set any value. DigitalShadows2TH’s home directory will be set to /opt/thehive_feeders/DigitalShadows2TH. To use the script, run the following command line and follow the instructions:

 $ wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheHive-Project/DigitalShadows2TH/mater/INSTALL/install_with_docker.sh | sudo -E bash -

Custom Case Templates

Previous versions of DigitalShadows2TH allowed only one case template to be associated with alerts created by the feeder in TheHive. Starting from DigitalShadows2TH 2.4.0, you can define a case template for each type of incidents raised by DigitalShadows in the configuration file.

The configuration pertaining to TheHive looks as follows:

TheHive = {
  'proxies':{
      'http': '',
      'https': ''
  },
    'url':'THEHIVE_URL',
    'key':'THEHIVE_API_KEY',
    'templates': {
        'default':''
    }
}

Each incident type in DigitalShadows can be associated with a case template in TheHive, for example:

TheHive = {
  'proxies':{
      'http': '',
      'https': ''
  },
    'url':'THEHIVE_URL',
    'key':'THEHIVE_API_KEY',
    'templates': {
        'default':'MY_DEFAULT_CASE_TEMPLATE_FOR_DIGITALSHADOWS_INCIDENTS',
        'DATA_LEAKAGE': 'MY_DATA_LEAKAGE_CASE_TEMPLATE',
        'CYBER_THREAT': 'MY_CYBER_THREAT_CASE_TEMPLATE'
    }
}

A template can be defined for all the following DigitalShadows incident types:

  • DATA_LEAKAGE
  • CYBER_THREAT
  • PHYSICAL_SECURITY
  • SOCIAL_MEDIA_COMPLIANCE
  • BRAND_PROTECTION
  • INFRASTRUCTURE

A default template can be defined for DigitalShadows incidents. If no template is found for a specific incident type, the feeder looks for the default template. if no default template is found, an empty case will be created by when importing the alert.

Update or Install

If you are not using docker, just pull the repository and update your configuration file with the new templates part for TheHive.

Update your Repository
$ cd /opt/TheHive_feeders/DigitalShadows2TH/
$ git pull

The configuration file has changed, so you need to update yours before running the program. A new templates section has been added for TheHive and the path has changed. It is now in the config/ directory of the project.

Install and Use via the Code Repository
$ cd /opt/TheHive_feeders 
$ git clone https://github.com/TheHive-Project/DigitalShadows2TH.git

After that, follow the prerequisites and edit the configuration file. In /opt/TheHive_feeders/DigitalShadows2TH/config/ copy config.py.template to config.py and modify it.

Use cases and detailed configuration instructions can be found in the README file in the repository.

Running Into Trouble?

Shall you encounter any difficulty, please join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We will be more than happy to help!

Searching for an Elastic? Here, Take 6!

As we announced on May 14, 2019, we have been working very hard to add Elasticsearch 6 support to TheHive and Cortex as Elasticsearch 5.x went the way of the dodo when Elastic plugged life support off this venerable version. We also took this occasion to upgrade AngularJS and its sub projects to 1.7.8, the latest 1.x version as of this writing. Additionally, Grunt build dependencies have also been updated to their latest compatible versions.

It took us more time than initially foreseen but hey, we all love deadlines. We all love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

TheHive 3.4.0-RC1 and Cortex 3.0.0-RC3 are now available on every Internet pipe near you and before you take them for a spin to help us identify any issues to make the stable releases rock-solid, let us walk you through some important information. Relax and grab a drink (and send good wine our way, we can always use some!).

Source: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-10

TheHive 3.4.0-RC1

In addition to ES5 and 6 support and the update of AngularJS, this version corrects a few bugs that were identified in the latest stable version (3.3.1) and adds a few features. The most important one in our opinion is the ability to import a file from a Cortex report. This requires Cortex 3.0.0-RC3. The full list of changes is available at the following location.

Prior to migrating to 3.4.0-RC1, please read the migration guide.

Cortex 3.0.0-RC3

ES5 and ES6 support, AngularJS et cetera et cetera. Well you know the song right? Not quite as Cortex 3.0.0 significantly facilitates analyzer and responder installation and updates, thanks to Docker as we touched upon in a blog post earlier this year.

As detailed in the Cortex migration guide, which we recommend you read thoroughly, you can migrate from Cortex 2 and keep using analyzers and responders the same way (using processes), use the new Docker-based analyzers and responders or mix and match between running processes and docker containers (but then, you gotta pay extra attention to configure properly which analyzer/responder runs in which fashion).

Moreover, if you use the new dockerised analyzers and responders, you will be able to choose if you want to have them autoupdated (that’s the default behaviour) and if so, pick the bleeding edge, potentially buggy versions, the minor releases or, if you are risk-averse, stick with stable ones.

Cortex 3.0.0-RC3 also adds the ability to retrieve files resulting from analyzer jobs and last but not least, corrects an information disclosure bug that allowed non-admin users to retrieve the details of other users through the API. The vulnerability was reported by Adam Maris so kudos to him!

Warning: Regressions Ahead!

As outlined in our previous post about these new versions:

  • TheHive 3.4.0-RC1 and Cortex 3.0.0-RC3 use HTTP transport (9200/tcp by default) to connect to Elasticsearch instead of its native binary protocol (9300/tcp by default).
  • SSL/TLS, including when using a client certificate, can be configured to connect securely to ES. However this has not been tested yet.
  • Support of X-Pack and Search Guard is discontinued for anything but basic and SSL client authentication, which would still work.

Caution: Performance May Take a Hit!

The parent-child relationships we use behind the scene in Elasticsearch could make queries significantly slower with ES 6 and in our limited testing, we had the impression that performance took a hit. So please be cautious there and we’d be grateful if you could report any sluggishness you notice during your tests of the new versions with ES6.

An Apology

Dear Users,

We owe you an apology. We thought we would never need to support Elasticsearch 7 or even 6. We thought we could stick with the latest version of Elasticsearch 5 as the underlying storage and indexing engine for TheHive and Cortex until we would be able to complete the transition to a graph database. Moving to such a database is a necessity for your favourite open source, free Security Incident Response Platform and its analysis and orchestration companion, a necessity that has grown out of our frustration with Elasticsearch and its limitations, with the breaking changes that ES 6 introduced which forbid a smooth transition and puts a significant toll on an open source initiative such as ours.

We initially thought we could complete the transition by October of last year and finally offer you long-desired features such as RBAC and multi-tenancy as well as establish a solid ground to implement some exciting ideas that would help you lower the barrier to entry for junior analysts, save more time and concentrate on your work instead of having to master copy/paste between various interfaces or moving from one tool to the other.

Sadly, things did not play out the way we wanted. As TheHive and Cortex were adopted by more and more organisations, feature requests kept piling up and being generous bees, we have always strived to keep our users happy within the confines of our limited resources. Certainly, our user community helped us significantly by contributing a huge number of analyzers to Cortex in no time, making the total amount fly past the 100 landmark. However, we had to rely mostly on ourselves for heavy-duty backend work while steadily releasing new versions to satisfy the appetite for capabilities that sounded reasonable and feasible within a realistic, acceptable timeframe. Multi-tenancy and RBAC also proved more complex than initially foreseen and since we hate a half-baked recipe (blame it on our French culture and our love for delicious food), we did not want to rush things out and add flimsy ‘patch’ code.

Source : https://kininaru-korean.net/archives/10305

So we focused on supporting graph databases and working on multi-tenancy and RBAC. You certainly noticed our silence these past weeks. And we completely lost sight of the end of life of ES 5.6 until we realised recently that it was no longer supported by Elastic, not even in critical bug fix mode. When ES 7 was released on April 10, the death sentence of ES 5.6 was pronounced and its coffin permanently nailed.

We know this is a lot to stomach. Welcome to the Upside Down! But remember: keep calm. Help is already on the way and hopefully this time around the cops will arrive before the movie is over. We are shifting our priorities to release new major versions of TheHive and Cortex in order to use a supported version of ES. This work should take a few weeks at least. In the meantime, if you are using TheHive and Cortex with their own, standalone ES instance and you have implemented sane network security measures to shield ES against unwanted remote access, you should be fine.

We also took the opportunity to look at what other external code we rely on and that would need to be updated as well, to avoid falling in the EOL trap again. Glad we looked! The current versions of TheHive and Cortex both use AngularJS 1.5 (here, take a stone and throw it the Hulk’s way on Nabil’s forehead). We are going to update our frontends to use AngularJS 1.7.

We will come up imminently with a concrete action plan to address our embarrassing miscalculation. Meanwhile, please accept our sincere apologies and rest assured that we won’t let you down.

ごめんなさい 🙏🏼

A Short Story of Getting Work Done: TheHive 3.3.0

Some of our die-hard fans noticed that we silently released TheHive 3.3.0 a few days ago, after six release candidates. Well. Silently won’t be the right word to use in this case as we are drowning under work and feature requests and we sometimes postpone communication in favour of getting true real work done.

So, without any further ado, we are happy to announce the official availability of our latest (and of course greatest) release of the most-advanced, next-gen, HI (Human Intelligence), gluten-free, (add here any keyword that you fancy to help us get the Gartner attention and land in the Magic Quadrant™), free and open source Security Incident Response Platform Security Orchestration Automation & Response Platform.

As stated earlier, TheHive 3.3.0 went through the largest number of release candidates to date in order to ensure it contains more features than bugs (or unexpected functionality as our dear Nabil call them sometimes).

Since RC5 which we have blogged about on Feb 26, 2019, below is an outline of the changes we made. Check TheHive Installation Guide for installation instructions.

The new Related Alerts tab in Case View introduced in 3.3.0-RC5

Fixed Issues

  • #899: fix a crashing issue encountered with Firefox
  • #907: dynamic (auto-refresh) of cases was broken in 3.3.0-RC5
  • #930: merging cases by CaseID was broken

Implemented Enhancements

  • #666: add support for filtering tags by prefix and wildcard search
  • #901: remove the possibility of creating cases from scratch (i.e. empty cases) when explicitly disabled by an admin
  • #908: add support for text-based widgets to the dashboards
  • #912: responders can now add tags to alerts when triggered thanks to the new AddTagToAlert operation

Looking for Help?

Something does not work as expected? Then please join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org.

Since You are Here

TheHive and Cortex are a huge success. According to our estimates, there are about a hundred organisations of different sizes and locations using or testing them. And as the number of users grows, so does the number of features, professional service and support requests. 

We tried finding a solution to keep TheHive Project as healthy as possible. So we created Creative Source, a nonprofit organisation (NPO), in the hope that we could leverage it to hire more developers thanks to the generous donations of our large user community. Sadly, not everyone in this world is generous and altruistic. At the end, all but one company (yes, exactly one) trusted us enough to make a donation and get tailored services for its needs in return. Most of the others either did not reply to our proposals or explained that their procurement process does not accommodate working with NPOs.

As we informed you a few weeks ago, some members of our core team are finalising an alternative option to ensure not only the viability of TheHive and Cortex as FOSS products on the long run but the ability to provide professional training, support, and services without making highly bureaucratic, think-in-the-box-but-never-outside procurement departments freak out.

Expect to hear from us soon…