Quick Start Guide¶

Zeek works on most modern, Unix-based systems and requires no custom hardware. It can be downloaded in either pre-built binary package or source code forms. See Installing for instructions on how to install Zeek.

In the examples below, $PREFIX is used to reference the Zeek installation root directory, which by default is /usr/local/zeek if you install from source.

Managing Zeek with ZeekControl¶

ZeekControl is an interactive shell for easily operating/managing Zeek installations on a single system or even across multiple systems in a traffic-monitoring cluster. This section explains how to use ZeekControl to manage a stand-alone Zeek installation. For a complete reference on ZeekControl, see the ZeekControl documentation. For instructions on how to configure a Zeek cluster, see the Cluster Configuration documentation.

Note

Using the standalone / single process mode of Zeek is not suitable for setups with significant amounts of traffic. In these cases one will almost certainly want to make use of a Zeek cluster.

A Minimal Starting Configuration¶

These are the basic configuration changes to make for a minimal ZeekControl installation that will manage a single Zeek instance on the localhost:

In $PREFIX/etc/node.cfg, set the right interface to monitor.
In $PREFIX/etc/networks.cfg, comment out the default settings and add the networks that Zeek will consider local to the monitored environment.
In $PREFIX/etc/zeekctl.cfg, change the MailTo email address to a desired recipient and the LogRotationInterval to a desired log archival frequency.

Now start the ZeekControl shell like:

zeekctl

Since this is the first-time use of the shell, perform an initial installation of the ZeekControl configuration:

[ZeekControl] > install

Then start up a Zeek instance:

[ZeekControl] > start

If there are errors while trying to start the Zeek instance, you can can view the details with the diag command. If started successfully, the Zeek instance will begin analyzing traffic according to a default policy and output the results in $PREFIX/logs.

Note

The user starting ZeekControl needs permission to capture network traffic. If you are not root, you may need to grant further privileges to the account you’re using; see the FAQ. Also, if it looks like Zeek is not seeing any traffic, check out the FAQ entry on checksum offloading.

You can leave it running for now, but to stop this Zeek instance you would do:

[ZeekControl] > stop

Browsing Log Files¶

By default, logs are written out in human-readable (ASCII) format and data is organized into columns (tab-delimited). Logs that are part of the current rotation interval are accumulated in $PREFIX/logs/current/ (if Zeek is not running, the directory will be empty). For example, the http.log contains the results of Zeek HTTP protocol analysis. Here are the first few columns of http.log:

# ts          uid          orig_h        orig_p  resp_h         resp_p
1311627961.8  HSH4uV8KVJg  192.168.1.100 52303   192.150.187.43 80

Logs that deal with analysis of a network protocol will often start like this: a timestamp, a unique connection identifier (UID), and a connection 4-tuple (originator host/port and responder host/port). The UID can be used to identify all logged activity (possibly across multiple log files) associated with a given connection 4-tuple over its lifetime.

The remaining columns of protocol-specific logs then detail the protocol-dependent activity that’s occurring. E.g. http.log’s next few columns (shortened for brevity) show a request to the root of Zeek website:

# method   host         uri  referrer  user_agent
GET        zeek.org  /    -         <...>Chrome/12.0.742.122<...>

Some logs are worth explicit mention:

conn.log

Contains an entry for every connection seen on the wire, with basic properties such as time and duration, originator and responder IP addresses, services and ports, payload size, and much more. This log provides a comprehensive record of the network’s activity.

notice.log

Identifies specific activity that Zeek recognizes as potentially interesting, odd, or bad. In Zeek-speak, such activity is called a “notice”.

By default, ZeekControl regularly takes all the logs from $PREFIX/logs/current and archives/compresses them to a directory named by date, e.g. $PREFIX/logs/2011-10-06. The frequency at which this is done can be configured via the LogRotationInterval option in $PREFIX/etc/zeekctl.cfg.

Deployment Customization¶

The goal of most Zeek deployments may be to send email alarms when a network event requires human intervention/investigation, but sometimes that conflicts with Zeek’s goal as a distribution to remain policy and site neutral – the events on one network may be less noteworthy than the same events on another. As a result, deploying Zeek can be an iterative process of updating its policy to take different actions for events that are noticed, and using its scripting language to programmatically extend traffic analysis in a precise way.

One of the first steps to take in customizing Zeek might be to get familiar with the notices it can generate by default and either tone down or escalate the action that’s taken when specific ones occur.

Let’s say that we’ve been looking at the notice.log for a bit and see two changes we want to make:

SSL::Invalid_Server_Cert (found in the note column) is one type of notice that means an SSL connection was established and the server’s certificate couldn’t be validated using Zeek’s default trust roots, but we want to ignore it.
SSL::Certificate_Expired is a notice type that is triggered when an SSL connection was established using an expired certificate. We want email when that happens, but only for certain servers on the local network (Zeek can also proactively monitor for certs that will soon expire, but this is just for demonstration purposes).

We’ve defined what we want to do, but need to know where to do it. The answer is to use a script written in the Zeek programming language, so let’s do a quick intro to Zeek scripting.

Zeek Scripts¶

Zeek ships with many pre-written scripts that are highly customizable to support traffic analysis for your specific environment. By default, these will be installed into $PREFIX/share/zeek and can be identified by the use of a .zeek file name extension. These files should never be edited directly as changes will be lost when upgrading to newer versions of Zeek. The exception to this rule is the directory $PREFIX/share/zeek/site where local site-specific files can be put without fear of being clobbered later. The other main script directories under $PREFIX/share/zeek are base and policy. By default, Zeek automatically loads all scripts under base (unless the -b command line option is supplied), which deal either with collecting basic/useful state about network activities or providing frameworks/utilities that extend Zeek’s functionality without any performance cost. Scripts under the policy directory may be more situational or costly, and so users must explicitly choose if they want to load them.

The main entry point for the default analysis configuration of a standalone Zeek instance managed by ZeekControl is the $PREFIX/share/zeek/site/local.zeek script. We’ll be adding to that in the following sections, but first we have to figure out what to add.

Redefining Script Option Variables¶

Many simple customizations just require you to redefine a variable from a standard Zeek script with your own value, using Zeek’s redef operator.

The typical way a standard Zeek script advertises tweak-able options to users is by defining variables with the &redef attribute and const qualifier. A redefineable constant might seem strange, but what that really means is that the variable’s value may not change at run-time, but whose initial value can be modified via the redef operator at parse-time.

Let’s continue on our path to modify the behavior for the two SSL notices. Looking at base/frameworks/notice/main.zeek, we see that it advertises:

module Notice;

export {
    ...
    ## Ignored notice types.
    const ignored_types: set[Notice::Type] = {} &redef;
}

That’s exactly what we want to do for the first notice. Add to local.zeek:

redef Notice::ignored_types += { SSL::Invalid_Server_Cert };

Note

The Notice namespace scoping is necessary here because the variable was declared and exported inside the Notice module, but is being referenced from outside of it. Variables declared and exported inside a module do not have to be scoped if referring to them while still inside the module.

Then go into the ZeekControl shell to check whether the configuration change is valid before installing it and then restarting the Zeek instance. The “deploy” command does all of this automatically:

[ZeekControl] > deploy
checking configurations ...
installing ...
removing old policies in /usr/local/zeek/spool/installed-scripts-do-not-touch/site ...
removing old policies in /usr/local/zeek/spool/installed-scripts-do-not-touch/auto ...
creating policy directories ...
installing site policies ...
generating standalone-layout.zeek ...
generating local-networks.zeek ...
generating zeekctl-config.zeek ...
generating zeekctl-config.sh ...
stopping ...
stopping zeek ...
starting ...
starting zeek ...

Now that the SSL notice is ignored, let’s look at how to send an email on the other notice. The notice framework has a similar option called emailed_types, but using that would generate email for all SSL servers with expired certificates and we only want email for connections to certain ones. There is a policy hook that is actually what is used to implement the simple functionality of ignored_types and emailed_types, but it’s extensible such that the condition and action taken on notices can be user-defined.

In local.zeek, let’s define a new policy hook handler body:

conditional-notice.zeek¶

@load protocols/ssl/expiring-certs

const watched_servers: set[addr] = {
    87.98.220.10,
} &redef;

# Site::local_nets usually isn't something you need to modify if
# ZeekControl automatically sets it up from networks.cfg.  It's
# shown here for completeness.
redef Site::local_nets += {
    87.98.0.0/16,
};

hook Notice::policy(n: Notice::Info)
    {
    if ( n$note != SSL::Certificate_Expired )
        return;

    if ( n$id$resp_h !in watched_servers )
        return;

    add n$actions[Notice::ACTION_EMAIL];
    }

$ zeek -r tls/tls-expired-cert.trace conditional-notice.zeek
$ cat notice.log
#separator \x09
#set_separator    ,
#empty_field      (empty)
#unset_field      -
#path     notice
#open     2018-12-14-17-36-05
#fields   ts      uid     id.orig_h       id.orig_p       id.resp_h       id.resp_p       fuid    file_mime_type  file_desc       proto   note    msg     sub     src     dst     p       n       peer_descr      actions suppress_for    dropped remote_location.country_code    remote_location.region  remote_location.city    remote_location.latitude        remote_location.longitude
#types    time    string  addr    port    addr    port    string  string  string  enum    enum    string  string  addr    addr    port    count   string  set[enum]       interval        bool    string  string  string  double  double
1394745603.293028 CHhAvVGS1DHFjwGM9       192.168.4.149   60539   87.98.220.10    443     F1fX1R2cDOzbvg17ye      -       -       tcp     SSL::Certificate_Expired        Certificate CN=www.spidh.org,OU=COMODO SSL,OU=Domain Control Validated expired at 2014-03-04-23:59:59.000000000 -       192.168.4.149   87.98.220.10    443     -       -       Notice::ACTION_EMAIL,Notice::ACTION_LOG 86400.000000    F       -       -       -       -       -
#close    2018-12-14-17-36-05

You’ll just have to trust the syntax for now, but what we’ve done is first declare our own variable to hold a set of watched addresses, watched_servers; then added a hook handler body to the policy that will generate an email whenever the notice type is an SSL expired certificate and the responding host stored inside the Info record’s connection field is in the set of watched servers.

Note

Record field member access is done with the ‘$’ character instead of a ‘.’ as might be expected from other languages, in order to avoid ambiguity with the built-in address type’s use of ‘.’ in IPv4 dotted decimal representations.

Remember, to finalize that configuration change perform the deploy command inside the ZeekControl shell.

Next Steps¶

By this point, we’ve learned how to set up the most basic Zeek instance and tweak the most basic options. Here’s some suggestions on what to explore next:

We only looked at how to change options declared in the notice framework, there’s many more options to look at in other script packages.
Continue reading with Using Zeek chapter which goes into more depth on working with Zeek; then look at Writing Scripts for learning how to start writing your own scripts.
Look at the scripts in $PREFIX/share/zeek/policy for further ones you may want to load; you can browse their documentation at the overview of script packages.
Reading the code of scripts that ship with Zeek is also a great way to gain further understanding of the language and how scripts tend to be structured.
Review the FAQ.
Continue reading below for another mini-tutorial on using Zeek as a standalone command-line utility.

Zeek as a Command-Line Utility¶

If you prefer not to use ZeekControl (e.g. don’t need its automation and management features), here’s how to directly control Zeek for your analysis activities from the command line for both live traffic and offline working from traces.

Monitoring Live Traffic¶

Analyzing live traffic from an interface is simple:

zeek -i en0 <list of scripts to load>

en0 can be replaced by the interface of your choice. A selection of common base scripts will be loaded by default.

Zeek will output log files into the working directory.

Note

The FAQ entries about capturing as an unprivileged user and checksum offloading are particularly relevant at this point.

Reading Packet Capture (pcap) Files¶

Capturing packets from an interface and writing them to a file can be done like this:

sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 -w mypackets.trace

Where en0 can be replaced by the correct interface for your system as shown by e.g. ifconfig. (The -s 0 argument tells it to capture whole packets; in cases where it’s not supported use -s 65535 instead).

After a while of capturing traffic, kill the tcpdump (with ctrl-c), and tell Zeek to perform all the default analysis on the capture which primarily includes :

zeek -r mypackets.trace

Zeek will output log files into the working directory.

If you are interested in more detection, you can again load the local script that we include as a suggested configuration:

zeek -r mypackets.trace local

Telling Zeek Which Scripts to Load¶

A command-line invocation of Zeek typically looks like:

zeek <options> <scripts...>

Where the last arguments are the specific policy scripts that this Zeek instance will load. These arguments don’t have to include the .zeek file extension, and if the corresponding script resides in the default search path, then it requires no path qualification. The following directories are included in the default search path for Zeek scripts:

./
<prefix>/share/zeek/
<prefix>/share/zeek/policy/
<prefix>/share/zeek/site/

These prefix paths can be used to load scripts like this:

zeek -r mypackets.trace frameworks/files/extract-all

This will load the <prefix>/share/zeek/policy/frameworks/files/extract-all.zeek script which will cause Zeek to extract all of the files it discovers in the PCAP.

Note

If one wants Zeek to be able to load scripts that live outside the default directories in Zeek’s installation root, the full path to the file(s) must be provided. See the default search path by running zeek --help.

You might notice that a script you load from the command line uses the @load directive in the Zeek language to declare dependence on other scripts. This directive is similar to the #include of C/C++, except the semantics are, “load this script if it hasn’t already been loaded.”

Further, a directory of scripts can be specified as an argument to be loaded as a “package” if it contains a __load__.zeek script that defines the scripts that are part of the package.

Local site customization¶

There is one script that is installed which is considered “local site customization” and is not overwritten when upgrades take place. To use the site-specific local.zeek script, just add it to the command-line (can also be loaded through scripts with @load):

zeek -i en0 local

This causes Zeek to load a script that prints a warning about lacking the Site::local_nets variable being configured. You can supply this information at the command line like this (supply your “local” subnets in place of the example subnets):

zeek -r mypackets.trace local "Site::local_nets += { 1.2.3.0/24, 5.6.7.0/24 }"

When running with Zeekctl, this value is set by configuring the networks.cfg file.

Running Zeek Without Installing¶

For developers that wish to run Zeek directly from the build/ directory (i.e., without performing make install), they will have to first adjust ZEEKPATH to look for scripts and additional files inside the build directory. Sourcing either build/zeek-path-dev.sh or build/zeek-path-dev.csh as appropriate for the current shell accomplishes this and also augments your PATH so you can use the Zeek binary directly:

./configure
make
source build/zeek-path-dev.sh
zeek <options>