


Example Argus Deployment and Functional Configuration


We describe two working Argus configurations.  All the IP network addresses
have been changed to protect the innocent.

The first and simplest configuration, the Argus daemon is run from a
host with a single network interface, and logs data directly to disk.
With this configuration, one may also connect directly to the auditing
host and collect data remotely in real time (see ra(1) using the -S option).
Steps should be taken to harden this host with respect to security to
insure the integrity of the Argus data.  This is a typical configuration
for auditing on trusted internal networks segments.

Note: due to a bug on Sun OS 4.X and the SNIT interface, no datagrams
sent from the auditing host will not be detected.  In order to avoid
confusion, in this configuration we recommend that you filter packets
involving the Argus host on the argus command line.

The second example configuration can be used to verify a network
firewall service policy for intrusion detection.  In this configuration,
the auditing host is stripped of all non-essential network services,
hardened with respect to security and an given an additional network
interface.  This extra interface is attached directly to the firewall
network and assigned the IP address of 0.0.0.0, so that it cannot be
accessed by any external hosts located outside the firewall.  Also,
the auditing host does not have a default route, and has IP forwarding
turned off in the kernel.  The following is an example of this
configuration:

                                    |
                               -----------
                               | Internet|
                               | Gateway |
                               -----------
                 Firewall Network   |  10.1.1.1
              |--------------------------------------------|
                            | 10.1.1.2       |  0.0.0.0
                       -----------      -----------
                       | Gateway |      |  Argus  |
                       |         |      |  Host   |
                       -----------      -----------
                            | 192.0.0.1      | 192.0.0.2
              |--------------------------------------------|
                             Internal Network

Note: since the primary interface of the Argus host (192.0.0.2) is attached 
directly to the internal network, we restrict the Argus host to routing only 
to the internal network for security purposes.

In both configurations, the Argus daemon is started from rc.local, i.e.,

   if [ -f /usr/argus/bin/argus_snit ]; then
      /usr/argus/bin/argus_snit -w /usr/argus/argus.file & 
      echo -n ' Argus'
   fi
 
When the Argus daemon reports a network transaction or an event, it opens
the file, writes the data, then closes.  Hence since the Unix mv(1)
command is autonomous, the Argus file can simply be moved to an archive 
directory for archival purposes, and the original file will continue to be
created without dropping data.  I.e. this is an example of a script run from 
cron(8) to move the file to an archive directory hourly,

   mv /usr/argus/argus.file /usr/argus/archive/argus.`date +%m.%d.%H`:00

