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Protecting a Dedibox server using CrowdSec

Reviewed on 03 October 2024Published on 11 October 2021
  • dedibox
  • security
  • CrowdSec
  • SSH
  • iptables

CrowdSec is an open-source software that detects malicious behavior from various connection sources, including infrastructure, systems, and applications. Similar to Fail2Ban, CrowdSec reads logs from several sources (eg: files and streams). It then parses and extracts information such as IPs, time, and environment to match it to patterns called scenarios.

Once malicious behavior is detected, its IP is stored via the Local API (LAPI), and another software called bouncer, also deployed on your machine, restricts access to this IP on your resources by querying the LAPI every X seconds. Various bouncers exist, blocking IPs with a firewall (iptables, nftables), Cloudflare, or Nginx.

Another feature enables every user of CrowdSec to share their banned IPs to a Central API (CAPI) managed by the CrowdSec team. When an IP is identified as being dangerous, it is shared with the whole community and is banned by the bouncers. This feature can be deactivated.

In this tutorial, we will set up CrowdSec on a Dedibox and protect the SSH connection.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

  • A Scaleway account logged into the console
  • Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
  • Created a Dedibox server and installed Debian on it
  • Connected to your Dedibox via SSH as root
  • Installed Docker on your Dedibox

Installing CrowdSec

  1. Update the apt package manager and install the dependencies:

    apt update
    apt install \
    apt-transport-https \
    curl \
    gnupg \
    lsb-release
  2. Add the CrowdSec GPG key:

    curl -L https://packagecloud.io/crowdsec/crowdsec/gpgkey | apt-key add -
  3. Add the address of the CrowdSec repository:

    echo "deb https://packagecloud.io/crowdsec/crowdsec/debian/ $(lsb_release -cs) main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/crowdsec_crowdsec.list
  4. Update the sources and install CrowdSec:

    apt update && apt install crowdsec

    CrowdSec is now installed on your Dedibox. By default, some scenarios and parsers are installed. You can list them using cscli:

    cscli parsers list
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    NAME 📦 STATUS VERSION LOCAL PATH
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    crowdsecurity/geoip-enrich ✔️ enabled 0.2 /etc/crowdsec/parsers/s02-enrich/geoip-enrich.yaml
    crowdsecurity/whitelists ✔️ enabled 0.2 /etc/crowdsec/parsers/s02-enrich/whitelists.yaml
    crowdsecurity/dateparse-enrich ✔️ enabled 0.1 /etc/crowdsec/parsers/s02-enrich/dateparse-enrich.yaml
    crowdsecurity/syslog-logs ✔️ enabled 0.4 /etc/crowdsec/parsers/s00-raw/syslog-logs.yaml
    crowdsecurity/sshd-logs ✔️ enabled 0.9 /etc/crowdsec/parsers/s01-parse/sshd-logs.yaml
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Some of these parsers are used to enrich the data from the malicious behaviors, with for example their localization or whitelisting. A real parser called crowdsecurity/sshd-logs allows to parse the logs from SSHD. Let us see the scenarios:

    cscli scenarios list
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    NAME 📦 STATUS VERSION LOCAL PATH
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    crowdsecurity/ssh-bf ✔️ enabled 0.1 /etc/crowdsec/scenarios/ssh-bf.yaml
    crowdsecurity/ssh-slow-bf ✔️ enabled 0.2 /etc/crowdsec/scenarios/ssh-slow-bf.yaml
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Two scenarios are also installed by default. They are designed to use the data from the sshd-logs parser. In our current setup, we can easily detect someone who is trying to connect to your machine. We can test that by spamming an SSH connection from your local machine to your Dedibox, or using software like hydra. The scenario is configured to be banned after 5 iterations from a single IP, but feel free to edit it by following the documentation.

    You can find your banned IPs using cscli:

    cscli decisions list
    +------+----------+----------------+----------------------+--------+---------+----------------+--------+--------------------+----------+
    | ID | SOURCE | SCOPE:VALUE | REASON | ACTION | COUNTRY | AS | EVENTS | EXPIRATION | ALERT ID |
    +------+----------+----------------+----------------------+--------+---------+----------------+--------+--------------------+----------+
    | 4633 | crowdsec | Ip:XX.XXX.XX.X | crowdsecurity/ssh-bf | ban | FR | XXXX | 6 | 3h59m52.953123908s | 14 |
    +------+----------+----------------+----------------------+--------+---------+----------------+--------+--------------------+----------+

    If you banned your local machine on your Dedibox, do not forget to unban it before continuing this tutorial:

    cscli decisions delete -i <your ip>
    Note

    At this moment, you can only detect suspicious behaviors, but these IPs are not banned. You have to install a bouncer on your Dedibox to achieve this.

Installing a bouncer

In this tutorial, we will use a bouncer that can manage iptables and ipset. Once an IP is detected by the CrowdSec Agent, the bouncer will add this IP to an ipset and his connection will be automatically dropped.

  1. Install the firewall bouncer:

    apt install crowdsec-firewall-bouncer-iptables
  2. Check that your bouncer is correctly installed:

    cscli bouncers list
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    NAME IP ADDRESS VALID LAST API PULL TYPE VERSION
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    FirewallBouncer-1633604730 127.0.0.1 ✔️ 2021-10-07T11:07:32Z crowdsec-firewall-bouncer v0.0.16-debian-pragmatic-ea64223d4e41c28b5d6324e82ab07625874ce507
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Ban a random IP manually to test it:

    cscli decisions add -i 1.2.3.4
    Tip

    We do not recommend banning your local machine, in case you lose your SSH connection.

  3. Run ipset list. You can see that the bouncer did its job and added a lot of IPs. These are the IPs from the CAPI, automatically banned. You can also easily find your manual ban:

    ipset list | grep "1.2.3.4"
    1.2.3.4 timeout 14387
    Note

    This ipset is in reality a hashtable, and thus is adding only one rule to your iptables. You can see it using iptables -L.

Monitoring CrowdSec

You can set up a dashboard on your machine to get a visual overview of all actions taken. However, this dashboard works only with the default database, SQLite. If you want to use PostgreSQL or MySQL, you will not be able to use the dashboard. You can start the dashboard container with:

cscli dashboard setup -l 0.0.0.0
INFO[07-10-2021 11:24:00 AM] Pulling docker image metabase/metabase:v0.37.0.2
...
INFO[07-10-2021 11:24:01 AM] creating container 'crowdsec-metabase'
INFO[07-10-2021 11:24:02 AM] waiting for metabase to be up (can take up to a minute)
...........
INFO[07-10-2021 11:24:45 AM] Metabase is ready
URL : 'http://0.0.0.0:3000'
username : 'crowdsec@crowdsec.net'
password : 'random password'
Note

The flag -l 0.0.0.0 is important for accessing any machine from the dashboard.

You can navigate to http://<your-Dedibox-public-IP>:3000/ and log in with the credentials given. You can list all the decisions and get graphs:

Tip

CrowdSec includes metrics that can be used by Prometheus. You can set up with Grafana and Prometheus different dashboards.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we saw how to easily set up a protection against SSH brute force attacks. CrowdSec has many parsers and scenarios available on the CrowdSec Hub. You can install them with cscli. You can also configure CrowdSec and customize it as you want. For more information, refer to the official documentation.

We saw here how to protect only one machine, but you could protect as many machines as you want with a centralized LAPI and all of your banned IPs will be synchronized.

Resources

  • CrowdSec website
  • CrowdSec documentation
  • CrowdSec hub
  • CrowdSec repository
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