Cloud Monitoring Tool

Project overview

This project aims at monitoring runtime health of virtual machines deployed on any cloud platform such as openstack, opennebula, etc. It is loosely based on the CloudMonatt architecture for openstack infrastructure. The term loosely is used because it does not provide a customized API for services provided by openstack, i.e., it is not strictly bound to the openstack infrastructure. The following figure shows the high level design of the CloudMonatt architecture (source: Monitoring and attestation of virtual machine security health, Tianwei Zhang, Ruby B. Lee)

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Application design

This application is uses a client-server model to monitor the virtual machines. It contains two major components:

• Attestation agent: A multi-threaded application that runs on each virtual machine. It collects relevant system attributes and sends them to the attestation server.
• Attestation server: A web server which receives runtime system information sent by the attestation agent, saves them in a database and provides access to them via a web API.

 ________________________
|                        |
|  Cloud infrastructure  |
|  ____________________  |  HTTP traffic   ______________________          _________________
| |                    |-|----------------|                      |        |                 |
| |  Virtual Machine   | |                |  Attestation server  |--------|  Web interface  |
| |____________________|-|----------------|______________________|        |_________________|
|                        | Socket traffic
|________________________|

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Setup instructions

Attestation server

Requires:

• node v18.16.0 (LTS)
• See package.json for all dependencies.
• PostgreSQL Database

  • On Linux (Debian), install using sudo apt install postgresql-X

    Where X is the major version number like: postgresql-14, postgresql-15

    Start the database, configure user credentials to access the database as follows:

    # Create the database
    sudo -u postgres createdb -e cec-term-project-group-8
    
    # Change the password for 'postgres' user
    # Connect to the database, 'postgres' user is allowed without authentication
    sudo -u postgres psql
    
    # Change the password by entering '\password'
    \password
    
    # Connect to the database, enter the password on prompt
    psql -U postgres cec-term-project-group-8
    
    # Set the configured '<username>:<password>' and the database name in the '.env' file.
    DATABASE_URL="postgres://postgres:p4ssw0rd@localhost/cec-term-project-group-8"

Setup process:

• Clone the attestation-server directory on a machine that will act as the attestation server.
• Install required dependencies: $ npm install
• Set the following environment variables:
  • DATABASE_URL
  • PORT
• Start server: $ node app.js
• The server should now be running on PORT port (default=3000).

Attestation agent

Requires:

• python v3.10+
• python-socketio v5.8.0
• requests v2.29.0

Setup process:

• Install and enable auditd for system auditing (requires sudo privileges):
  $ apt install auditd audispd-plugins
$ systemctl enable auditd
• Clone the attestation_agent directory on a virtual machine.
• Install required packages: $ pip install -r attestation_agent/requirements.txt
• Configure parameters in attestation_agent/config.py:
  • ATTESTATION_HOST: IPv4 address of the attestation server.
  • ATTESTATION_PORT: Port on which attestation server API is available.
• Other parameters can also be changed based on system configuration.
• Run the agent: $ python -m attestation_agent

Dashboard

Requires:

• node v18.16.0 (LTS)
• See package.json for all dependencies.

Setup process:

• Clone the frontend directory on some machine (can be same as the attestation server) and navigate inside it.
• Install required dependencies: $ npm install
  • If this does not work due to mismatched versions, use: $ npm install --legacy-peer-deps
• Start server: $ npm start
• The frontend should now be running on port 8080.

Note:

• This has been tested on Ubuntu Server 22.04 instances, independent from the openstack infrastructure. Running this on openstack requires some additional configurations which are specific to managing instances on the infrastructure itself.
• The attestation agent runs completely in user mode. On Ubuntu server, reading log files does not require sudo privileges. However, running this on other servers such as CentOS, Fedora, etc., may require modifying read permissions for the log files specified in attestation_agent/config.py.

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