Tag: TheHive 4

TheHive 4.0.4 and TheHive4py 1.8.1: alerts got more APIs

Dear community, the new year has brought us another opportunity to build new features in your favorite Security Incident Response Platform, TheHive. We wish you a cheerful new year ahead and we thank you for being beside us all these years.

Last week, we released TheHive 4.0.4 and TheHive4py 1.8.1, and here is the official announcement including the details of the new features.

These releases focused on adding more capabilities to play with alert observables and give more flexibility when building alert feeders.

Please find the change logs for more details:

What’s new in TheHive

New Alert observable APIs

The major change in TheHive 4.0.4 is related to alert management. In TheHive 3, alert observables were included in the alert as an array of observable objects, and not as independent objects with links to the alert itself. This data model made alert observables CRUD operations, a bit challenging.

TheHive 4 has a better design for this, and alert observables have their own existence, and can be added/updated and deleted independently from the alert object.

This new design allows adding dedicated API endpoints to:

  • Add an observable to an existing alert;
  • Update the data of an existing alert observable;
  • Delete an observable from an alert.

Those APIs are not used by the user interface for now.

New Alert properties

This release introduced a new property called `importDate`. It represents the date at which an alert has been merged into a new/existing case. This property is then used to:

  • Allow filtering the alert list, for example: “List the alerts merged today”
  • Display the duration between the alert creation and its merge into a case.
Alert list showcasing alert importDate

This new property is of course available on the dashboard creation UI as a date field, among others:

  • imported: true if the alert has been merged
  • `handlingDurationInSeconds`: number of seconds before importing an alert
  • `handlingDurationInMinutes`: number of minutes before importing an alert
  • `handlingDurationInHours`: number of hours before importing an alert
  • `handlingDurationInDays`: number of days before importing an alert

To showcase the mentioned new properties, here are some screenshots:

importDate field used on a line chart as date field for x-axis
Simple line chart using the imported filter
Dashboard including two charts using the newly introduced alert fields

What’s new in TheHive4py

The 1.8.1 release of TheHive4py mainly focuses on adding support to the new alert APIs introduced by TheHive 4.0.4. It comes with 3 new functions:

  • `create_alert_artifact` to allow developers adding a new artifact to an existing alert
from thehive4py.api import TheHiveApi
from thehive4py.models import Tlp

THEHIVE_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:9000'
THEHIVE_API_KEY = '**YOUR_API_KEY**'

api = TheHiveApi(THEHIVE_URL, THEHIVE_API_KEY)

# Instanciate a new domain artifact
artifact = AlertArtifact(dataType='domain', data='malicious-domain.tld', ignoreSimilarity=True, ioc=True)
api.create_alert_artifact(ALERT_ID, artifact)

# Instanciate a new file artifact
artifact = AlertArtifact(
    dataType='file', 
    data='malicious-file.exe', 
    ignoreSimilarity=False, 
    ioc=True, 
    sighted=True, 
    tlp=Tlp.RED.value)
api.create_alert_artifact(alert_id, artifact)
  • `update-alert-artifact` to allow updating the data of an existing alert artifact:
from thehive4py.api import TheHiveApi
from thehive4py.models import Tlp

THEHIVE_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:9000'
THEHIVE_API_KEY = '**YOUR_API_KEY**'

api = TheHiveApi(THEHIVE_URL, THEHIVE_API_KEY)

# Create a new domain artifact
artifact = AlertArtifact(dataType='domain', data='malicious-domain.tld', ignoreSimilarity=True, ioc=True)
response = api.create_alert_artifact(ALERT_ID, artifact)

# Update its tlp, sighted and ignoreSimilarity flags
artifact_data = response.json()[0]
artifact_data['tlp'] = Tlp.RED.value
artifact_data['sighted'] = True
artifact_data['ignoreSimilarity'] = False

new_artifact = AlertArtifact(json=artifact_data)
api.update_alert_artifact(artifact_data['id'], new_artifact, fields=['tlp', 'ioc', 'ignoreSimilarity'])
  • `delete_alert_artifact` to allow removing an existing artifact from an existing alert
from thehive4py.api import TheHiveApi

THEHIVE_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:9000'
THEHIVE_API_KEY = '**YOUR_API_KEY**'

api = TheHiveApi(THEHIVE_URL, THEHIVE_API_KEY)

# Delete alert artifact
api.delete_alert_artifact(ARTIFACT_ID)

Note that these new three methods are only available when using TheHive4py with TheHive 4.0.4+

You can find more details on the official documentation of TheHive4py.

Updating/Installing

To update your existing package to version 1.8.1:

$ sudo pip install thehive4py --upgrade

How to report issues

Please open an issue on GitHub with the dedicated template for TheHive 4 or the dedicated form for TheHive4py. We will monitor them closely and respond accordingly. 

Running Into Trouble?

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

Xmas Release: TheHive 4.0.3

This year is coming to an end. It’s a new opportunity to our team to release a new version of your favorite free and open source incident response platform, TheHive. We don’t aim to bother you during your Xmas holidays, but we thought of those who will be in front of their screens during the years’ last days.

Today, we announce the release of 4.0.3 that comes with some interesting enhancements and bug fixes.

What’s new?

The major features added in this release are:

  • improvement of the task management capabilities for collaboration, by adding a new flag called “Action Required”
  • review and improvement of the implementation of MISP synchronisation filters
  • new API capability to allow searching for Alerts per observables
  • new S3 provider and configuration for file storage (observables and task log attachments)

Require an action on a task

This feature is useful for collaboration to allow a master team requiring actions from the teams it collaborates with. Let’s explain it using a concrete example. Imagine a TheHive instance defining two organisations: SOC and CERT, both of them working on a Case led by the CERT team who is the owner of the Case.

For one of the tasks, the incident handler from the CERT team needs an action from the SOC team on a Task called “Gather evidences or IOC”. In the Task’s details page, at the “Sharing” section, for each “Share”, a new button “Require Action” is displayed. It allows any user with `manageTask` permission to enable the flag for the specific organisation for that specific Task.

The incident handler can also require an action from his team members.

Task details, Require Action from its own team
Task details, Require Action from another team

When the user clicks the “Require Action” button, TheHive asks if a Task Log needs to be added to the Task, to explain the required action. The user can proceed without adding a Task Log

Require Action confirmation dialog

If the user clicks on “Yes, add log”, a dialog is displayed asking the user to type a Task Log message and optionally add an attachment:

Add Task Log dialog

Once confirmed, the action is completed and the Task is marked as requiring action from the right team.

Action required from the SOC team on the “Gather evidences or IOC” Task

This feature comes not only with these Task related buttons but also includes some features for Case and Task listing pages, including filtering: its easier to list the cases where at least one task is still requiring an action from a team:

List of cases requiring actions

When navigating to the Task list, the user can easily see which Task needs an action:

Task list, filtered by the action required flag

When a user accesses a Task that is marked as requiring an action, the Task details page displays a warning message, with a “Mark as Done” button, that when clicked, confirms the completion of the required action:

Action Required warning message

When clicked, the “Mark as Done” button goes through the same confirm dialog as described above, allowing to optionally add a Task Log.

Review MISP filters configuration

TheHive 4.0.3 has reviewed and improved the performance of the MISP synchronisation services and added a new config to whitelist events by organisation, not only by tags. Below is a non exhaustive configuration of a MISP server, where the `whitelist.organisation` filter is used:

play.modules.enabled += org.thp.thehive.connector.misp.MispModule
misp {
  interval: 1 hour
  servers: [
    {
      name = "local"            # MISP name
      url = "http://localhost/" # URL or MISP
      auth {
        type = key
        key = "***"             # MISP API key
      }

      ...

      # Organization and tags 
      whitelist {
        organisation = ["good organisation"]
      #  tags = ["tag1", "tag2"]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Search for alerts by observable conditions

In TheHive 3, Alert observables are stored within the Alert data, not as un independent piece of data, and querying them is not possible through the `_search` APIs and the Query DSL.

In 4.0.3 this limitation has been removed, allowing querying an alert with conditions on it’s child observables.

Using TheHive4py, the following code is now possible:

import json
from thehive4py.api import TheHiveApi
from thehive4py.models import *
from thehive4py.query import *

THEHIVE_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:9000'
THEHIVE_API_KEY = 'API_KEY'

api = TheHiveApi(THEHIVE_URL, THEHIVE_API_KEY)

# Define the query
query = And(
    Eq('source', 'THEHIVE-PROJECT'),
    Eq('severity', Severity.MEDIUM.value),
    Child('alert_artifact', And(
        Eq('dataType', 'hash'),
        Eq('data', 'A_HASH_VALUE')
    )),
    Like('title', '*MALSPAM*')
)

# Search for alerts
response = api.find_alerts(query=query, range='all')

# Print 
print(response.json(), indent=4)

The code snippet above, searches for Alerts of with:

  • source='TheHive-Project'
  • severity=medium
  • title including the word “MALSPAM”
  • having a specific `hash` observable

S3 storage support

File storage is used in TheHive to store attachments. TheHive now supports a new type of storage in addition to hadoop and local file system: Amazon S3.

S3 storage provider can be configured by specifying endpoint, region and credentials. The settings must be located in the provider section, in application.conf:

storage {
  provider: s3
  s3 {
    bucket = "thehive"
    readTimeout = 1 minute
    writeTimeout = 1 minute
    chunkSize = 1 MB
    endpoint = "http://s3.amazonaws.com"
    accessKey = "xxx"
    secretKey = "xxx"
    region = "us-west-1"
  }
}

How to install/update ?

Our installation guides are up-to-date.

Important note

If you are updating an existing instance of TheHive 4.0.0, ensure to read the installation guide. Since our recent release of TheHive 3.5.0, we updated our repositories. The codename of repositories containing all new released packages is now named release, instead of stable. So update your apt or yum repository file.

How to report issues

Please open an issue on GitHub with the dedicated template for TheHive 4. We will monitor them closely and respond accordingly. 

Running Into Trouble?

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

It’s not Patch Friday… TheHive 4.0.2 released

Last Friday, our team released a significant number of changes and fixes, improving TheHive 4. The community was very reactive and hurried to test it. Today we are announcing a patch release to fix annoying issues we decided to quickly patch: welcome to 4.0.2.

The major issue is related to Alert bulk merging which is part of the big refactoring of the Alert listing section.

Well, s**t happens, but as a gentlemen, we owe you a feature, or two 🙂

What’s new?

In addition to the Alert bulk merging issue, we fixed bugs related to:

  • Migration
  • Filtering observables by attachement attributes
  • Backward compatible APIs

Curious to read the detailed change log? Here your go.

TheHiveFS, do you remember?

It stands for TheHive File System, a feature we released with TheHive 4.0-RC1. In today’s milestone we are improving the security of this feature by adding a new user permission, required to have access to TheHiveFS features.

The newly created accessTheHiveFS permission is included by default in both org-admin and analyst user profiles.

Refined editable fields, for a better UX

In TheHive UI, editing objects relies on editable fields instead of dedicated form to edit objects. This means you can update a case title by clicking the Blue Pencil icon displayed when you mouse-over the case title for exemple.

In this release we refactored all the editable fields to provide a better user experience:

  • You no longer need to click just on the `Blue Pencil` icon to switch to edit mode, you just need to click on any value, for example the Case assignee field, or the Observable tags field:
Editable fields on mouse over events

Editable fields have now a `Clear` option, allowing users to unset the value of an attribute:

Editable custom fields can be set empty

This new improvement benefits to the custom fields sections in Case and Alert details sections, as showcased above.

Configurable layout of custom fields

In older TheHive versions, custom fields were displayed using a single column. Cases with big number of custom fields produced a long scrolling Case details pages, so we decided in TheHive 4 to use a 3-column layout to reduce the resulting scroll fatigue.

Now some users are complaining because of long custom fields values not being correctly displayed. So we decided to let users choose their preferred layout.

1-column layout to display custom fields in a Case details page
2-columns layout

How to install/update ?

Our installation guides are up-to-date.

Important note

If you are updating an existing instance of TheHive 4.0.0, ensure to read the installation guide. Since our recent release of TheHive 3.5.0, we updated our repositories. The codename of repositories containing all new released packages is now named release, instead of stable. So update your apt or yum repository file.

Have you got a minute to let us know how you use TheHive ?

We would love to hear from you (10 questions < 1minute) : https://t.co/l5osjvQ1k7

Many thanks for taking the time 🙏

How to report issues

Please open an issue on GitHub with the dedicated template for TheHive 4. We will monitor them closely and respond accordingly. 

Running Into Trouble?

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

It’s now time for TheHive 4 to get an update: TheHive 4.0.1 is out!

Source: https://dilbert.com/

Back in July, we announced TheHive 4.0, the foundation for future releases of your favorite Open Source SIRP.

Today, we are pleased to deliver one of the biggest patch releases we’ve done so far, in terms of number of fixed issues: TheHive 4.0.1! Not only did we squash lots of bugs, we also included some cool improvements we didn’t want to hold until the next version.

As for TheHive 3 and Cortex unveiled few days ago, we fixed the vulnerabilities reported by Play framework in October as well.

A huge work has been accomplished to fix a backlog of bugs (thanks to the community) in several parts of the product:

  • Configuration;
  • API;
  • Dashboards;
  • Livestream;
  • Cases;
  • Alerts;
  • Observables;
  • Multi Factor authentication;
  • Active Directory authentication;
  • Export to MISP.

You can find details of the 80+ issues included in this milestone: Changelog file.

Wait, there is also new stuff:

  • Cases and Alerts similarity fine tuning;
  • Similar cases in Alert preview panel refined;
  • Filtering capabilities improvements;
  • New UI settings & options;
  • Custom fields in Case and Alert lists;
  • Statistics panel improvements;
  • API key in user settings page;
  • More migration tool options.

Cases and Alerts similarity fine tuning

In TheHive, correlation between Alerts and Cases, and between Cases themselves, is computed throughout their respective Observables:

  • A Case is considered similar to an Alert, if they have at least one common observable;
  • A Case is considered related to another Case, if they have at least one common observable.

In some situations, those relationships are undesirable when based on useless/meaningless observables.

Starting with TheHive 4.0.1, Observables are enriched with a new attribute called ignoreSimilarity, set to false by default. Now, when this attribute is set to true, an observable is simply not taken into account in the relationship between two cases, and is not involved in the similarity calculation, for Cases and Alerts.

This attribute is displayed alongside with the IOC and Sighted flags, in the Observables list – which has been tweaked for the occasion – as well as in the detailed view.

IgnoreSimilarity flag in the revamped Observables list

And you can also edit this for a set of selected observables.

Edit “Ignored for similarity”

Long story short, if you want to break a correlation, you just need to set the linking Observable‘s ignoreSimilarity flag to true.

Alerts and similar Cases

The attribute mentioned earlier is taken into account when correlating Alerts with existing Cases : the Similar Cases view in the Alert preview dialog.

Observables with ignoreSimilarity set to true will be ignored when fetching cases similar to the current Alert, whether it is in the Alert or the Case side.

A forthcoming update of thehive4py library will allow to set this attribute in Alerts, along with many other new things.

The Similar Cases view has been thoroughly enhanced to provide more highlights facilitating alert triage and the merging of alerts into existing cases. First, a column named “Matched” has been added. It contains the list of observable dataTypes and the number of occurrences matching the Alert : this should be very useful to identify quickly what type of data has matched the alert content. A filter on this column has also been added.

And there are more refining capabilities in this view:

  • Sorting and Filtering on Title of Similar Cases;
  • Specifying a minimum observables rate that matches the Alert;
  • Specifying a minimum IOCs rate that matches the Alert.
Refining the Similar Cases view during Alerts triage

… And, above all, columns can now be sorted. With all these new capabilities, triage and merge Alerts in Cases should be easier.

Filtering capabilities improvement

In TheHive 4, filter forms have the same structure all over the product. Any improvement in the area, benefits to all the listing pages.

For example, in the alert similar cases tab, a new filter form has been included. You can quickly select the type of Cases you want to display, but also use the advanced rules and search criterias.

In this release, the filter component has new capabilities:

  • Date filter: now allows setting dynamic ranges instead of setting from and to fixed date values. Possible values are:
    • Today;
    • Last 7 days;
    • Last 30 days;
    • Last 3 months;
    • Last 6 months;
    • Last year;
    • Custom: allowing the old-fashioned way of setting date ranges.
  • Tag filter: Autocomplete is now enabled.
Advanced filtering for Similar Cases during Alert triage
Autocompleted tags when adding a filter

In TheHive 4.0.1, there is one more place that welcomed a filter form: the list of Alert observables in the preview dialog.

New Org level UI settings

UI configuration page is the place where TheHive adds new options to customise the behavior of the UI, for a given organisation. This is an area that will be expanded over time.

For this milestone, two new options have been introduced:

  • Allow merging Alerts in resolved cases;
  • Default filter of Alert similar cases.
Default filter for Similar Cases in Alerts preview

The first one is self-explanatory and will hide the `Merge into case` button in the Alert similar cases section

The second one allows an administrator define, for an organisation, the default filter to apply to Alert similar cases view. For example: “show only potential similar cases created in the last 7 days and are still open”.

If during the triage, the filter has been updated by an analyst, the default filter cas be retrieved through Default filter option of the Quick Filters.

Retrieve default filter in alert similar cases

Custom fields in Case and Alert lists

“Damn, why I’m not able to see my custom fields in my cases list”, “It’s a shame I cannot filter my alerts with my custom defined properties”… We are pretty sure you said it, at least once.

Well, you dreamt of it, and here we go, we did it for Cases and Alerts

  • You will be able to see all the custom fields you defined in your Case Templates and propagated to your Cases;
  • Custom fields with undefined values are not displayed;
  • Custom fields are shown with respect of the order you define;
  • Clicking on a custom field, filters your lists using the selected value;
  • You can enable displaying the custom fields using the toggle button on the toolbar located on top of the filter form;
  • All those capabilities are available in Cases and Alerts views.
Custom Fields in Alerts list

New statistics view in Cases and Observables lists

The Stats view has been revamped to represent the statistics using both tables and shiny colourful donuts (not only for managers).

This improvement has been made in Cases, Observables and Alerts views.

New “Stats view” in Cases list

User settings

This feature has been initially introduced in Cortex and was missing in TheHive. All users can now access their API key, copy or update it, as long as an administrator created it first. No more API keys sent over emails or chat applications.

User settings with API key enabled

Migration

The migration assistant program has been updated with a few bug fixes and new filtering options. When migrating, you can now specify:

  • If you want to include or exclude Alerts generated from specific Sources or by their Type;
  • If you want to include Audit trails regarding specific objectType (case, case_task, case_observable …);
  • If you want to filter out Audit trails with specific actions (Update, Creation, Delete).
/opt/thehive/bin/migrate --help

[..]  
  --include-alert-types ,...
                           migrate only alerts with this types
  --exclude-alert-types ,...
                           don't migrate alerts with this types
  --include-alert-sources ,...
                           migrate only alerts with this sources
  --exclude-alert-sources ,...
                           don't migrate alerts with this sources
[..]   
  --include-audit-actions 
                           migration only audits with this action (Update, Creation, Delete)
  --exclude-audit-actions 
                           don't migration audits with this action (Update, Creation, Delete)
  --include-audit-objectTypes 
                           migration only audits with this objectType (case, case_artifact, case_task, ...)
  --exclude-audit-objectTypes 
                           don't migration audits with this objectType (case, case_artifact, case_task, ...)

So, you can migrate your data directly to TheHive 4.0.1.

However, please note that the migration tool does not support data from TheHive 3.5.0 yet. In short, you can only consider migrating you data from TheHive 3.4.0, 3.4.1, 3.4.2 or 3.4.4 to TheHive 4.0 or TheHive 4.0.1 for the time being.

How to install/update ?

Our installation guides are up-to-date.

Important note

If you are updating an existing instance of TheHive 4.0.0, ensure to read the installation guide. Since our recent release of TheHive 3.5.0, we updated our repositories. The codename of repositories containing all new released packages is now named release, instead of stable. So update your apt or yum repository file.

Have you got a minute to let us know how you use TheHive ?

We would love to hear from you (10 questions < 1minute) : https://t.co/l5osjvQ1k7

Many thanks for taking the time 🙏

How to report issues

Please open an issue on GitHub with the dedicated template for TheHive 4. We will monitor them closely and respond accordingly. 

Running Into Trouble?

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

ElasticSearch, TheHive and Cortex

For a few weeks, many questions have been arising regarding the End of Life of ElasticSearch 6.8, and its impact on TheHive and Cortex applications.

We were about to release TheHive 4.0-RC3 when Thomas, akwardly calmly announced to us, having found some time (where?) to review new features and most important, breaking changes introduced by ES7. We have now a good idea of what should be updated or added in the code, as well as the amont of work it represents to get the application working perfectly.

What about current version ?

Few months ago, we announced our intention to maintain current stable versions until ES6 End of Life. At that time, we didn’t expect it to be sooner.

Discontinuing TheHive 3.x with the release of TheHive 4.0 has never been in our plans. With the time, more and more organisations adopted them, and it is important for us to give everyone enough space to schedule and make the move to the TheHive 4.0. This is why TheHive 3 and Cortex 3 will support ES7.

The good news is our ability to announce that the changes introduced by ES7 have no major impacts on us, We are scheduling a first RC1 for TheHive 3.5.0 and Cortex 3.1.0 in the last week of July. Not only will they include support for ES7, but also a few interesting improvements that will be introduced in the coming blog posts.

What’s next ?

Needless to say, the chiefs are sparing no effort in focusing on TheHive 4.0, which requires a huge amount of attention. The application stack has completely changed – the most important adjustment is pushing aside ElasticSearch in favour of Cassandra to manage TheHive’s data storage – and thanks to the community, lots of bugs have already been fixed allowing it to be stronger with time.

Once we consider TheHive 4.0 reliable enough to be used in production, we will publish it as a stable version, and that would be in the coming days. After all, our plans are to make the applications use the same technology stack, which will directly benefit to the next major version of Cortex.

Besides, Cortex is scheduled to be upgraded and based upon Scalligraph, Cassandra and Hadoop. We hope to publish a first RC in few months.

Stay tuned sounds like TheHive Project’s Twitter account will be on fire 🔥 in the coming days!

TheHive 4.0-RC3, a new kid on the block

Three weeks ago, on May 6th, we announced the availability of TheHive 4.0 RC-2 release and the active community made the usual hard work of testing the release to find bugs and ask for enhancements.

Special thanks to Christopher, alias crackytsi who has already created 122 Github issues, 11 of them are just for 4.0-RC-3 milestone.

We are thrilled to present our third release candidate before the final release of TheHive 4. As the RC-2, this milestone brings new features and fixes a nice set of issues.

This blog post will focus on the following new features:

  • Multi-orgs users
  • Switch organisation
  • OAuth2
  • Migration tool performance
  • Case sharing overview

If you are curious about all the issues that have been addressed, you can read the full changelog

Multi-orgs users

This feature doesn’t introduce UI changes, but it allows a superadmin or an org-admin to add an existing user to an organisation.

Users in TheHive 4 are identified by their email addresses, so when an administrator adds a new user, with an email address that already exists, TheHive 4 links that existing user to the organisation being updated.

This ends up with a single User record on the database, linked to multiple organisations. Thanks to the new graph data model. This means the given user has:

  • the same credentials
  • the same api key, if enabled
  • the same 2FA settings, if enables
  • the same status (locked or not)

With that being said, the user can have a different profile for on the organisation (s)he belongs to.

What happens when a user is logged in?

As we mentioned earlier, a user belonging to several organisations, has the same authentication settings, and after the login, his/her workspace is opened with the context of the first organisation (s)he has been created on.

For example, if John was firstly created on the *SocLevel2* organisation, and was later attached to *CTI* organisation, then after signing in, the user is redirected to the workspace of *SocLevel2* organisation.

Future improvements

We will consider allowing the user to define a default organisation to be displayed juste after the login. We are examining the possibility to allow the user to define a default organisation to be displayed just after the login process. Hopefully, we will be able to add this feature in TheHive 4.0.0 release.

Switch organisation

This feature empowers the multi-tenancy capabilities brought to you by TheHive 4. Following what has been showcased above, how can a user, who belongs to more than one organisation, switch between his/her tenants?

The UI introduces a simple feature, available to “multi-org” users only, as a button on the right hand side of the page’s header, aka. the navigation bar.

The switch organisation action button

This button is just hidden for users who belong to a single organisation.

Once clicked, that button show a dialog that displays the following details:

  • user’s organisations
  • user’s profile on each organisation
  • the current organisation

Clicking on an item of this list, refreshes the page by loading the context of the selected organisation, and the UI behaves like if the user was logged in a a member of that selected organisation.

Very useful.

Switch organisation dialog

OAuth2

We had a considerable amount of users asking for SSO and OAuth support in TheHive. We tried to make it more robust in TheHive 4, and let it rely on a redirectUri provided by the backend (/api/ssoLogin) instead of the old redirectUri that some OAuth providers don’t support (index.html/#!/ssoLogin).

In TheHive 4.0 RC-2, OAuth 2 partially worked, and failed to redirect the user to the home page after the authentication success. Yes, sorry for that.

We spent some time testing the new implementation. We will devote some blog posts to it, but firstly, here is a working example relying on Keycloak

auth {
  providers: [
    {name: session}               # required !
    {name: basic, realm: thehive}
    {name: local}
    {name: key}    
    {
      ##############
      # Keycloak
      ##############
      name: oauth2
      clientId: "CLIENT_ID"
      clientSecret: "CLIENT_SECRET" # or empty
      redirectUri: "http://THEHIVE/api/ssoLogin"
      responseType: "code"
      grantType: "authorization_code"
      authorizationUrl: "http://KEYCLOAK/auth/realms/TENANT/protocol/openid-connect/auth"
      authorizationHeader: "Bearer"
      tokenUrl: "http://KEYCLOAK/auth/realms/TENANT/protocol/openid-connect/token"
      userUrl: "http://KEYCLOAK/auth/realms/TENANT/protocol/openid-connect/userinfo"
      scope: ["openid", "email"]
      userIdField: "email"
    }
  ]
}

After a question asked on Twitter, we tried to test our OAuth implementation with the providers mentioned in the answers, and we have successfully tested:

Migration tool performance

The migration tool we implemented in TheHive 4.0 RC-2 suffered from important performance issues as a result of our desire for a clean design.

In fact, enabling database locks during a parallelised and asynchronous processing of the migration operations produce a migration tool with poor performance.

We changed the strategy, by disabling locks and programmatically handling duplicates if they happen. This ended by a significant improvement of performance

We hope you can test it and provide us with your feedback.

Case sharing overview

Case sharing is the most important feature that the multi-tenancy support adds to TheHive. Allowing users to quickly spot if a case is owned or is coming from a share (made by another organisation) improves the user’s experience.

The other handy information is: the number of organisations having access to a certain case

Case list with sharing indicators

This screenshot shows all the case sharing related UI element:

  • The blue line, indicates that the case is coming from another organisation
  • The green line, indicates that the case is owned by the current organisation
  • The red line, highlights the column that show the number of organisation having access to the corresponding case

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 4.0-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.

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!