Osquery

Celebrating our 2023 open-source contributions

At Trail of Bits, we pride ourselves on making our best tools open source, such as Slither, PolyTracker, and RPC Investigator. But while this post is about open source, it’s not about our tools… In 2023, our employees submitted over 450 pull requests (PRs) that were merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories. This demonstrates our […]

We do Windows now

At Trail of Bits, we pride ourselves on building tools that everyone can use to help improve the security ecosystem. Given how ingrained Microsoft is with a large portion of our work — binary analysis, cryptography, cloud security — our teams’ research and development has resulted in numerous tool releases for the public to incorporate […]

Osquery: Using D-Bus to query systemd data

Rachel Cipkins, Stevens Institute of Technology
During my summer internship at Trail of Bits I worked on osquery, the massively popular open-source endpoint monitoring agent used for intrusion detection, threat hunting, operational monitoring, and many other functions. Available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database, […]

Announcing the Zeek Agent

Mike Myers
(This posting is cross-posted between the Zeek blog and the Trail of Bits blog). The Zeek Network Security Monitor provides a powerful open-source platform for network traffic analysis. However, from its network vantage point, Zeek lacks access to host-level semantics, such as the process and user accounts that are responsible for any connections observed. The […]

Real-time file monitoring on Windows with osquery

William Woodruff
TL;DR: Trail of Bits has developed ntfs_journal_events, a new event-based osquery table for Windows that enables real-time file change monitoring. You can use this table today to performantly monitor changes to specific files, directories, and entire patterns on your Windows endpoints. Read the schema documentation here! File monitoring for fleet security and management purposes File […]

QueryCon 2019: A Turning Point for osquery

Lauren Pearl
Has it really been 3 months since Trail of Bits hosted QueryCon? We’ve had such a busy and productive summer that we nearly forgot to go back and reflect on the success of this event! On June 20-21, Trail of Bits partnered with Kolide and Carbon Back to host the 2nd annual QueryCon, at the […]

Why you should go to QueryCon this week

Lauren Pearl
QueryCon takes place this week at the Convene Conference Center in Downtown Manhattan, Thursday June 20th- Friday June 21st. If you don’t have a ticket yet, get one while you can. QueryCon is an annual conference about osquery, the open source project that’s helping many top tech companies manage their endpoints. We’ve been big fans […]

Using osquery for remote forensics

Mike Myers
System administrators use osquery for endpoint telemetry and daily monitoring. Security threat hunters use it to find indicators of compromise on their systems. Now another audience is discovering osquery: forensic analysts. While osquery core is great for querying various system-level data remotely, forensics extensions will give it the ability to inspect to deeper-level data structures […]

Announcing the community-oriented osquery fork, osql

Mike Myers
For months, Facebook has been heavily refactoring the entire osquery codebase, migrating osquery away from standard development tools like CMake and integrating it with Facebook’s internal tooling. Their intention was to improve code quality, implement additional tests, and move the project to a more modular architecture. In practice, the changes sacrificed support for a number […]

Announcing QueryCon 2019

Mike Myers
Exciting news: We’re hosting the second annual QueryCon on June 20th-21st in New York City, co-sponsored by Kolide and Carbon Black! Register here QueryCon has become the foremost event for the osquery and osql open-source community. QueryCon brings together core maintainers, developers, and end-users to teach, discuss, and collaborate on Facebook’s award-winning open-source endpoint detection […]

Get an open-source security multiplier

Lauren Pearl
An increasing number of organizations and companies (including the federal government) rely on open-source projects in their security operations architecture, secure development tools, and beyond. Open-source solutions offer numerous advantages to development-savvy teams ready to take ownership of their security challenges. Teams can implement them to provide foundational capabilities, like “process logs” or “access machine […]

Announcing the Trail of Bits osquery support group

Lauren Pearl
As great as it is, osquery could be a whole lot better. (Think write access for extensions, triggered responses upon detection, and even better performance, reliability and ease of use.) Facebook’s small osquery team can’t respond to every request for enhancement. That’s understandable. They have their hands full with managing the osquery community, reviewing PRs, […]

QueryCon 2018: our talks and takeaways

Lauren Pearl
Sometimes a conference just gets it right. Good talks, single track, select engaged attendees, and no sales talks. It’s a recipe for success that Kolide got right on its very first try with QueryCon, the first-ever osquery conference. It’s no secret that we are huge fans of osquery, Facebook’s award-winning open source endpoint detection tool. […]

Manage your fleet’s firewalls with osquery

Garret Reece
We’re releasing an extension for osquery that lets you manage the local firewalls of your fleet. Each of the three major operating systems provides a native firewall, capable of blocking incoming and outgoing access when configured. However, the interface for each of these three firewall systems are dissimilar and each requires different methods of configuration. […]

Manage Santa within osquery

Garret Reece
We’re releasing an extension for osquery that lets you manage Google Santa without the need for a separate sync server. Google Santa is an application whitelist and blacklist system for macOS ideal for deployment across managed fleets. It uses a sync server from which daemons pull rules onto managed computers. However, the sync server provides […]