Iris: A Global P2P network for Sharing Threat Intelligence

Iris is a P2P system for collaborative defense proposed by Bc. Martin Řepa as a diploma thesis work (see the thesis for theoretical details). This repository hosts a reference implementation written in Golang using LibP2P project along with integration of Iris into Slips IPS and Fides Trust Model.

For more details regarding architecture/implementation, we refer reader to docs/architecture.md or the thesis itself.

Motivation

shortened thesis abstract:

Despite the severity and amount of daily cyberattacks, the best solutions our community has so far are centralised, threat intelligence shared lists; or centralised, commercially-based defence products. No system exists yet to automatically connect endpoints globally and share information about new attacks to improve their security.

Iris allows collaborative defence in cyberspace with emphasis on security and privacy concerns. It is a pure and completely decentralised P2P network that allows peers to (i) share threat intelligence files, (ii) alert peers about detected attacks, and (iii) ask peers about their opinion on potential attacks. Iris addresses the problem of confidentiality of local threat intelligence data by introducing the concept of Organisations. Organisations are cryptographically-verified and trusted groups of peers within the P2P network. They allow Iris to send content only to pre-trusted groups of peers.

Dependencies

To run a standalone peer, you need:

• a running redis instance
• golang (>1.17)

User Guide

OrgSig Tool

For pleasure manipulation with organisations, we present a tool called orgsig. Orgsig is a small program written in Golang that can generate organisations or sign existing peers ID using already generated organisation.

> make orgsig 
go build cmd/orgsig.go
>  ./orgsig --help
Running v0.0.1 orgsig

Usage of ./orgsig:
  -load-key-path string
    	Path to a file with organisation private key. If not set, new private-key is generated.
  -peer-id string
    	Public ID of a peer to sign. Flag --sign-peer must be set for this option to be valid.
  -save-key-path string
    	If set, value will be used as a path to save organisation private-key.
  -sign-peer
    	Flag to sign peer ID. Flag peer-id can be used to set peerID, otherwise, cli will ask. The signature will be printed to stdout.

Running a Peer

Starting a peer with reference configuration is as simple as running (assuming a Redis instance is running on local host):

make run

Debugging, Running Multiple Peers

To run silmutaniously multiple peers, you can use already prepared docker-compose file with pre-configured 4 peers. The network of 4 peers can be started with (note that you must have docker installed):

> make network

This command starts docker-compose with 4 peers in separate containers and one container with separate Redis instance. Every peer connects to a different Redis channel and waits for messages from Fides (Fides mock has not yet been implemented). The peers will connect to each other and thus form a small network. Configuration files of every peer can be found in dev/ directory. To interact with the peers, you must act as Fides Trust Model and send to the peers manually a message by publishing some messages through Redis channels. Example PUBLISH commands can be found in dev/redisobj.dev.

Todo/Future Work:

• Fides Trust Model Mock for better testing and debugging
• Complete reference integration of Iris, Fides and Slips inside docker-compose
• Signal handling for graceful shutdown
• After a peer connects to the network, search immediately for members of trustworthy organisations. So far only connector does it.
• Implement message (bytes?) rate-limiting per individual peers to mitigate flooding attacks (or adaptive gossips?)
• Use more the Reporting Protocol to report misbehaving peers
• Implement purging of keys after some time (configurable?) in peers' message cache
• responseStorage goroutines should not wait for responses from peers that disconnected during the waiting. Otherwise, when that happens it's gonna unnecessarily wait until the timeout occurs
• storageResponse goroutines should wait only for responses from peers where requests were successfully sent (err was nil)
• implement purging of file metadata after files expire (viz currently not used field ElapsedAt)
• Is reference basic manager really trimming peers based on their reliability? Need to be checked
• Plus Future Work mentioned in the thesis itself