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:

If a user loses access to their TOTP application, only an administrator can restore access to their account.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We will consider making 2FA mandatory in TheHive 4.1.

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.

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.

Mum, Docker Docks Don’t Dock Well!

Soon after we released Cortex-Analyzers 2.4.0, Jérôme noticed that something was definitely wrong. And that something was plural.

As he set to retest a few things here and there, he realised that many docker images, for the latest and greatest analyzers and responders, were not automatically built. The code factory wasn’t working 😰

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/8021817@N07/6262431675

So he started digging. And the more he dug, the more bugs he discovered. Our user community also reported a few issues. He thought it was about time he opens that bottle of Aloxe-Corton, put a Makaya McCraven album to play on his turntable, and rolls his sleeves to address all these problems headfirst 🍷

After a few hours of intense work, he managed to fix the docker build process and release Cortex-Analyzers 2.4.1, a hotfix that corrects the following issues:

[#545] Message extraction using FileInfo doesn’t always work
[#610] The VirusTotal analyzer contains a typo which prevents it from running
[#614] Many analyzers fail to run due to incorrect permissions
[#619] Abuse Finder not working with docker after force usage of python3
[#620] Missing library prevented the build of the docker image corresponding to the new MalwareClustering analyzer

Finally, he took the opportunity to rename Palo Alto AUTOFOCUS analyzers to Autofocus, for consistency purposes.

Please refer to our previous blog post, pertaining to Cortex-Analyzers 2.4.0, for update instructions.

Thank you in advance for your understanding and happy cyberfighting! 💪🏼

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!

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!

Cortex 3.0.1: The ‘Better Logging’ Edition

Lo and behold, we aren’t dead & TheHive Project ain’t toast! So, foremost, Happy New Year folks (we are still in January, right?)! We have some nice gifts coming up for you, gifts that have required very heavy-duty work. Of course, you might complain that we haven’t been responsive as of late but hey, there’s only so much we can do, right?

Happy New Year Folks! (Photo by Saâd Kadhi)

We’ll talk about those gifts in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, there’s a new Cortex version in town and we urge you to upgrade to it, particularly if you consider deploying several Cortex nodes as a cluster. Indeed, Cortex 3.0.1 fixes a missing dependency that is required to set up such an architecture. Additionally (and this is the part where you should be paying attention), this version fixes the display of error messages pertaining to analyzer and responder operations, and also ensure that old responders and analyzers no longer show up once you clicked on that Refresh button.

Fixes and Enhancements

#244 Prevent the Play secret key from being displayed in the logs at startup. Nonetheless, you can still display it (for troubleshooting purposes or to make things easier for attackers that might have access to the logs and be interested in such a world-changing secret) by using the --show-secret option when starting Cortex
#243 fixes the display of error messages when analyzers & responders fail
#242 Remove references to Google Fonts
#238 The Docker image had 4 critical CVEs and 69 high CVEs (*cough*). Contributed by Micheal Hart
#239 Missing dependency for cluster bug
#234 fixes a bug where old, non-existent analysers were still showing in Cortex after an upgrade. Contributed by daskydasky
#241 Analyzer reports no output when it fails
#240 An encoding issue causes an invalid format in the catalog file
#230 Elastic4play has dropped the ES cluster configuration option. Contributed by Adeel Ahmad
#164 Handle second/minute-rates limits on Flavors and Analyzers

Running Into Trouble?

Shall you encounter any difficulty during the upgrade process, please ask on our user forum, get in touch with the community on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org.

Unleash the Power of Dockerized Analyzers in 5 Minutes

One of the big improvements you’ll notice in Cortex 3 is the support for dockerized analyzers. And amongst some of their benefits, the installation process has been significantly simplified. So let’s assume you do not want to bang your head against Python, or other library dependencies. Then read one for a way to set up analyzers and run them quickly.

The following instructions have been tested on Ubuntu 18.04. If you already have a Cortex instance up and running, you can jump directly to the docker installation section below.

Install System Packages

Prerequisites

Ensure your system contains the required packages:

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

Oh, and Cortex should have access to the internet 😉

Cortex

Configure your system to install packages from TheHive-Project repositories.

echo 'deb https://dl.bintray.com/thehive-project/debian-stable any main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/thehive-project.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu --recv-key 562CBC1C

Install Cortex:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cortex

The Cortex files will be put in /opt/cortex. The Cortex binary will be executed using the cortex account.

The configuration file is /etc/cortex/application.conf.

The Cortex log file is /var/log/cortex/application.log.

Docker

We recommend reading the Docker documentation to install the software.

For Ubuntu 18.04, you can run the following commands:

wget -O- https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu bionic stable"
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install docker-ce

Use Docker with Cortex

Start by giving the cortex account the permission to run Docker.

usermod -a -G docker cortex

Next, in the Cortex configuration file (/etc/cortex/application.conf) ensure jobs will be executed using Docker:

job {
  runner = [docker]
}

Follow the Standard Analyzer Catalog

If you are a complete Cortex noob, please read the Quick Start Guide.

Configure Cortex to get the catalog with up-to-date versions of analyzers. Edit /etc/cortex/application.conf to set the catalog URLs in the analyzer configuration section as shown below:

## ANALYZERS
#
analyzer {
  urls = ["https://dl.bintray.com/thehive-project/cortexneurons/analyzers.json"]
[..]
}

Once Cortex is configured, restart the service with the following command, wait a few seconds and you should be able to connect to Cortex on https://<cortex_host>:9001 et voilà!

sudo service restart cortex

Important Note: The catalog analyzers.json contains information regarding versions of analyzers we consider stable and that are updated with bug fixes. This is typically synchronised with our master branch on Github. When you are using this catalog, you are de facto benefiting from the latest analyzer updates without needing to refresh anything in Cortex or setup again the configuration to get the latest version.

We also provide two additional catalogs:

analyzers-stable.json which strictly follows versions of analyzers if you do not want any uncontrolled updates. What does that mean in practice? You will have to click on the Refresh button in Cortex to update your analyzers, disable old ones and enable new versions. Moreover, you will also have to setup again their configuration. Typically, if you installed and setup Cortex with this catalog and the current version of FileInfo analyzers is 6.0, you won’t benefit from the next version, let’s say 6.1, unless you refresh Cortex.
analyzers-devel.jsonwhich contains information about new analyzers or version of analyzers that contains code that has been reviewed but not tested enough (or even not tested at all at times) to be deemed ready for production environments. This is typically synchronized with the develop branch of our Github repository.

Same goes for responders. All available catalogs for Cortex are published on bintray so you can choose the one that better fits your needs (or your risk/gambling profile :p).

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.

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:

TheHive 3.4.0-RC2
TheHive 3.4.0 (final release, which also allows you to remove Custom Fields)
Cortex 3.0.0-RC4
Cortex 3.0.0 (final release, fixes only one issue: #210)

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!

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 🙏🏼