Implement Crowdsec, a docker and sever level crowd sourced security guard

privsec

I would like to suggest implemententing Crowdsec as a built-in feature to a cloudron install. Assuming most of our installs (speaking on the community behalf) are internet facing, something like this, could become very powerful and beneficial as a security feature.

necrevistonnezr

@privsec Looks quite interesting. French company. Built in Go.

https://danielmiessler.com/study/crowdsec/

So the system doesn’t just detect attacks using its view into your logs, it can also trigger various actions once something is detected, such as:

Blocking people in Cloudflare

Running your own arbitrary scripts

Executing a block in netfilter/iptables

Denying an IP in Nginx

Blocking in WordPress

Etc.
This tells me they’re thinking big and long-term with this thing, and not just as a replacement for a local banning tool.

jdaviescoates

@privsec nice find. I think Akismet kinda works like this for WordPress (and there was another Drupal one too) but I've always wondered why there wasn't something more generic.

privsec

@jdaviescoates
Thanks! It looks very interesting.

And from what I have read, it will also anonymize your logs.

Mastadamus

@privsec huge fan of this idea.

privsec

To add to how awesome this software is

https://crowdsec.net/faq/

Server-side treatments involve the following:

    Collecting information (IP / Timestamp / Scenario) sent by the network members accepting to share them
    Distributing curated IP block list (tailor-made for each, according to their choices in the back office (coming soon))

The reputation system (feeding your local daemon with IPs to block), can be deactivated and/or replaced by another source of reputation in the configuration, making the software 100% able to function in a standalone manner if you want absolutely no dependency on any online service. With the local API (LAPI, as of v1.0) agents can be deployed & configured 100% offline if you want to.

privsec

To unban yourself, if you do
https://crowdsec.net/unban-my-ip/

JOduMonT

For me, the nicer part of that project is they have "crowdsec client" which it is able to listen inside the docker habitat and with the bouncer apply rules at the host level.

@privsec you should change the title since in that case it would replace more than just Fail2Ban and protect more than just SSH.

Mastadamus

@privsec Have you installed this with your cloudron?

teamcrw

Did anyone install it on a cloudron instance? We are using it on various Ubuntu rootservers and it works.

teamcrw

@teamcrw i just installed it now and will get back if i encounter any problems

Mastadamus

@teamcrw are you installing an nginx bouncer with it?

Mastadamus

@mastadamus I'd like to give an update. I installed the NGINX bouncer and it took down cloudron's NGINX service. During the install it prompted me if i wanted to change several config files or leave the current file in place and I left my current config file in place yet it still crashed and refused to come back up. More investigation is necessary to make this work.

Mastadamus

@mastadamus The IP TABLE bouncer seems to be working fine. Also I installed the metabase Docker container running on 8181 with success.

teamcrw

@mastadamus no didn't install nginx bouncer with it. i didn't encounter any problems since i installed it with default settings.

Mastadamus

@teamcrw I realized crowdsec isn't succesfully parsing the NGINX logs generated by cloudron because Cloudron uses a non standard /non default log format for NGINX. Working on that now.

klausagnoletti

Hi!

Just to let you good people know: I am head of community at CrowdSec and I think it's a great idea if Cloudron has build-in support for CrowdSec.

I would be happy to help anyone here out in installing it - and of course to facilitate Cloudron the help they would need to implement it.

Just DM me or write me at klaus (at) crowdsec (dot) net.

Mastadamus

@mastadamus I've since got the logs to be parsed by taking out the custom "combined2" log format for nginx.conf. If this is to be shipped with cloudron it would either require to have custom parsers written OR the nginx.conf for cloudron would need to use default combined log format.

I am using an iptable bouncer and i'm not sure if it will perform block actions on the iptables based of something triggerd by nginx. I will dig further into that. That being said, it is fullfulling the role fail2ban would normally play and is working appropriately.

privsec

@mastadamus said in Implement Crowdsec, a docker and sever level crowd sourced security guard:

@mastadamus I've since got the logs to be parsed by taking out the custom "combined2" log format for nginx.conf. If this is to be shipped with cloudron it would either require to have custom parsers written OR the nginx.conf for cloudron would need to use default combined log format.

I am using an iptable bouncer and i'm not sure if it will perform block actions on the iptables based of something triggerd by nginx. I will dig further into that. That being said, it is fullfulling the role fail2ban would normally play and is working appropriately.

@klausagnoletti is this something that could be done by your team?

Mastadamus

@privsec The other thing to consider is, when i installed the nginx bouncer, even though i left configs default, it crashed the nginx service and i couldn't restart it. Even after I uninstalled the bouncer, I couldn't get nginx back so i had reverted to a snapshot. The iptable bouncer works decent though. Will have to do further testing to figure out why installing the nginx bouncer crashes nginx for cloudron.

klausagnoletti

@klausagnoletti is this something that could be done by your team?

Sorry but which part? Parsers?

privsec

@klausagnoletti yup

klausagnoletti

@privsec Yes of course. If you post a question about it in our Discourse https://discourse.crowdsec.net I am sure someone on the team is able to help.

makemrproper

@mastadamus Confirmed. This happened to me today, when I tried to install Crowdsec with Nginx bouncer onto my Cloudron VM.

Thank heavens for a good backup strategy. Digital Ocean snapshots to the rescue.

To have Crowdsec working with my Cloudron install would be a massive value add.

I am not even sure why Nginx failed to start afterwards. I did however note that the install modified or wiped a lot of the Nginx configs which were already in place and perhaps modified by Cloudron. But I haven't tried to dive any deeper.

Mastadamus

@makemrproper yeah I tried it twice and first time told it to keep original config and second time allowed modifications.. both times nginx refused to start and I couldn't figure out why.

Mastadamus

@makemrproper my strategy now is to use iptables bouncer with nginx parser.

See my feature request for nginx log method though.. you have to revert cloudron nginx logs back to nginx default and not combined2 as they are normally or crowdsec parser won't work..

klausagnoletti

Hey, since I was here last time we have created a Discord server and that would be a good place to influence CrowdSec devs to implement CrowdSec into Cloudron

rmdes

In my experience, DO not install the nginx bouncer, it's useless if you install the firewall-bouncer anyway. (the firewall bouncer catch attacks, probs etc..even before they reach the nginx server)

There is another post on this forum another user and me share their steps by steps to get it running.

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Implement Crowdsec, a docker and sever level crowd sourced security guard