Traffic Analyzer - Phase 1

Well, the foundations for the Traffic Analyzer module were finally laid today; the basic classes of the module are now up in the SVN repository.

So far I've only constructed the classes for Unix and not Windows, I've created a separate branch for the Windows code but the associated directory is currently empty. Of course, there may be source files which will end up being common to both branches, however I don't think that maintaining a more complex directory structure in order to have both branches share common source files is something that's currently necessary (or something I currently know how to do!).

So right now the Traffic Analyzer can detect packet traffic and deconstruct packets sequentially using some clever pointer logic and special structs; nothing new there. There are a few command line arguments that the user can use to customize how the program runs and I've even included the old ConfigReader class from previous projects which can be used to read and parse standard .conf files or user-specified configuration files.

The problem right now is threefold:

1. How do I properly parse the packet payload? I don't understand enough about the special characters I'm currently seeing padding the SQL queries to know what they mean, how I might use them or whether I can discard them.
2. Will there be much of a headache in porting this code to Windows? I've got some knowledge of Winpcap but what else is there to consider? My experience with Windows program development has been so blissfully limited up until this point.
3. How much of a pain in the ass is the MySQL API going to be to master? It doesn't look that bad but I expect there's going to be buckets of code needed in order to sanitize every little thing that's entered into the Auditing database. Even getting around this with the help of the MySQL++ libraries wasn't easy last time!

In any case, the next steps involve sorting out the above 3 issues (after entering them on the issues wiki of course!) and killing any bugs found along the way. Overall I'm quite happy with the code I've submitted thus far, I've tried to keep it as modular as possible and I think the distinct purpose of each class used is pretty obvious and changeable. So far so good! We'll see what kind of a mess this all degenerates into once we've progressed down the line a bit further :D

Our First Project Meeting

Well I have to say, Skype is a piece of crap. Between the abysmal sound quality/compression artifacting and the compatibility issues with my Gentoo install we had a nightmare trying to communicate, eventually resorting to text chat.

I think we clarified a few ideas during this session, mostly spec-related but with one or two interesting ideas cropping up.

One notable thought was local auditing; how do we watch local administrators' queries? We can't capture packets from their session since they're working on the server itself so what can we do? This may involve a whole other branch of code that allows us to send local server events to the auditing server for storage and flagging. I'm not entirely sure how we're supposed to sit between the user and the mysql server, especially if the user is a domain/local administrator and has some determination not to get caught!

Another interesting thought was rules; flagging certain queries depending on their content, preferably based on some modular set of parameters that we can change on the fly. I'm thinking up a nice multi-threaded model for this at the moment, I'll have to go and look up pthread again to get the specifics on mutex usage for this one but I'm pretty certain it's doable. A polling model may be necessary in order to detect the addition of new parameters/rules, however, if we're to assume that they're added through the admin interface to the auditing database itself. I think there are some MySQL trigger-like options that could be used here.

Definitely looking forward to the next meeting and to getting some serious coding done, these distributed-type apps are always a laugh, I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into the MySQL C API specifically since I've only really used the MySQL++ library up until now and that's a bit limited.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to get involved with the design of the admin interface at some point, and that Umair will throw some ideas my way regarding the query interpretation module, adding a nice bit of overlap to our work. I think an interface based on Ajax design principles would be ideal, and not very difficult to implement if we were to write the php database-query functions first and the actual display afterwards. We'll see though...

Entry the First

Well there hasn't been any actual coding work done yet, this is just the project setup phase. This blog is connected to the Google Summer of Code 2007 Project "MySQL Auditing Software", the project page can be found at this link.

The project team is composed of myself, Umair Mehmood and the project mentor, Sheeri Kritzer. We'll be holding a conference call this Friday on Skype in order to exchange notes and design ideas.

I already have a fair idea of how this software can be designed, based on discussions with the project team members and research done into similar products I believe that a design based on passive packet capture is a good way to go. The resulting captured data can then be interpreted and reformed in whatever way we see fit before being passed on to the database servers.