Your (Firewall) Data are Ugly. Please Fix It.

Data warehousing and data marts would be simple to construct if only the data were in a standard format. Five years from now, businesses will take OLAP for granted. (OLAP is a fancy way of saying we're going to automate the sums and averages of your sales data over time so you don't have to do all that stuff in Excel any more.) Five to ten years from now, businesses will live or die by their data mining algorithms. (I classify DM as a step above standard OLAP.) Before this can happen, the data have to be available in a usable form.

I come from an information security background, thus I spend far too much time poring over computer logs: web server access logs, firewall logs, Windows event logs, not to mention /var/log/*. I have learned lots of stupid log tricks, like using logwatch, grep (my favorite), Snare to send Windows logs to syslog, and now, Microsoft's free Logparser tool. Logparser has poor documentation but will certainly pay you back for time taken to learn to use it. There's even a non-Microsoft site dedicated to logparser.

Note: Syslog does not store data in 3NF rows. If you want to be able to sort by fields with destPort, sourcePort, sourceIP, destIP, without doing text search, you'll be doing a LOT of ETL work.

This week I was thinking about replacing my firewall/router (a Netopia R9100 with the hardware VPN upgrade that I trade off with a Linksys WRT-54GS (v3) when I'm not paranoid about using wireless.) And yes, I'm not supposed to tell you that, but it doesn't really make a difference if we're both using nmap. So I looked at firewall vendors websites to learn what I could about logging capabilities. I'm slightly less concerned about security in my home lab than I am about collecting data on attacks. Firewalls have been around for over ten years now, so you'd think they would have logging down.

Watchguard: several logging options, including syslog and XML, SNMP costs extra.

Juniper/NetScreen: syslog, SNMP, NetIQ (If I feel like paying for that, too.)

Checkpoint: "Eventia Reporter™ is a complete reporting system that delivers in-depth network security activity and event information from Check Point log data." This means I can look at CheckPoint logs, but I can't correlate them to anything else. This Checkpoint vs. Cisco page is also interesting.

SonicWall: "ViewPoint®, Local Log, Syslog, WebTrends" I can pay extra for SonicWall's "Viewpoint" product, but I still can't correlate SonicWall logs to any other logs. One SonicWall includes a "secure" switch in their firewall: I would love to see what happens when I try an arp spoof. (If I wanted a switch, I would buy one.)

Cisco PIX: SNMP, Syslog, and AAA ("Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Support") It does Cisco logging. It also has a CLI. (Command-Line Interface.) Unless Cisco starts giving me free hardware, I'm not sure why I'd use a PIX. If I blow a command, my network is not secure. A CLI is fine when it's obvious if a command is working or not, as with routing, but with firewalls, it makes me nervous. Then again, you should test every port after entering a rule change on your firewall.

Microsoft ISA Server: "ISA Server 2004 provides detailed security and access logs in standard data formats, such as delimited text files, Microsoft SQL Server databases, or SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) databases."

I don't even like software firewalls, but Microsoft makes it easy for me. At $1,500 plus $250 for decent software, Watchguard is more expensive than ISA server. Checkpoint and Juniper won't even tell me how much their products cost. Sonicwall, Watchguard, and ISA Server are all priced on CDW.

If firewall data are this disparate, I can't imagine what a pain it must be to build data warehouses with data from other sources. Current firewall products seem to create their own silos and make it difficult to track intruders across a network rather than just at the perimeter.