Ingesting AWS Flow Logs
This document describes how to configure AWS flow logs for ingestion by the Sensor.
About the Sensor
The Sensor examines your network traffic in order to identify a variety of network events that can be of interest to the VMware NSX Network Detection and Response. This ranges from file transfers (for example, executables, documents, or email messages) to suspicious network interactions, to metadata on network activities observed in the environment (for example, netflow, pdns, or webrequests). All this information is extracted by the Sensor and streamed to the VMware backend that processes and presents the data to the user.
The Sensor is available as a software ISO that you install on your own hardware or in a VMware ESXi VM, as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), or as an Azure VM.
About AWS VPC flow logs
AWS Flow logs capture information about the IP traffic traversing an AWS VPC. The flow log data can be published to Amazon S3 logs and Amazon CloudWatch. You can then integrate the flow logs for ingestion by the VMware NSX Network Detection and Response.
Before the system can ingest flow logs, you must configure AWS credentials.
Configure AWS credentials
To obtain the Access key ID and
Secret access key, login to your AWS IAM
dashboard and select the appropriate account. On the Summary
page, select the Security credentials tab. Click Create access
key to generate a new Access key ID and Secret
access key. Amazon encourages you to download these credentials in
csv
format. There is no subsequent way of obtaining the secret access
key. However, you can always create another key pair.
The IAM role should be configured with the minimal security policy recommended by ScoutSuite. An IAM role can only be used with a Sensor running as an AWS instance.
Configure AWS authentication on the AWS credentials tab. These credentials are used for the collection of VPC flow logs or the acquisition of AWS Cloud Asset data. You can authenticate to AWS using an access key or an IAM role.
Publish flow logs to Amazon S3
On AWS, configure your VPC to send flow logs to Amazon S3.
Refer to the Amazon documentation Publishing Flow Logs to Amazon S3 and Create a Bucket for more details.
Ingest flow logs from Amazon S3
Configure the User Portal to ingest flow logs from Amazon S3.
Publish flow logs to CloudWatch logs
On AWS, configure your VPC to send flow logs to CloudWatch logs.
Refer to the Amazon documentation for more details.
Ingest flow logs from Amazon CloudWatch
Configure the User Portal to ingest flow logs from Amazon CloudWatch.