How to Send Cowrie Output to a MySQL Database

Prerequisites

  • Working Cowrie installation
  • MySQL Server installation

Installation

Run:

$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev python-mysqldb
$ su - cowrie
$ source cowrie/cowrie-env/bin/activate
$ pip install mysqlclient

Previously MySQL-python was used. Only if you run into isses with mysqlclient, try this instead:

$ pip install MySQL-python

MySQL Configuration

First create an empty database named ‘cowrie’:

$ mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE cowrie;

Create a cowrie user account for the database and grant all access privileges:

GRANT ALL ON cowrie.* TO 'cowrie'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD HERE';

Restricted Privileges:

Alternatively you can grant the cowrie account with less privileges. The following command grants the account with the bare minimum required for the output logging to function:

GRANT INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE ON cowrie.* TO 'cowrie'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD HERE';

Apply the privilege settings and exit mysql:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Next, log into the MySQL database using the cowrie account to verify proper access privileges and load the database schema provided in the docs/sql/ directory:

$ cd ~/cowrie/docs/sql/
$ mysql -u cowrie -p
USE cowrie;
source mysql.sql;
exit

Cowrie Configuration

Uncomment and update the following entries to ~/cowrie/cowrie.cfg under the Output Plugins section:

[output_mysql]
host = localhost
database = cowrie
username = cowrie
password = PASSWORD HERE
port = 3306
debug = false
enabled = true

Restart Cowrie:

$ cd ~/cowrie/bin/
$ ./cowrie restart

Verify That the MySQL Output Engine Has Been Loaded

Check the end of the ~/cowrie/log/cowrie.log to make sure that the MySQL output engine has loaded successfully:

$ cd ~/cowrie/log/
$ tail cowrie.log

Example expected output:

2017-11-27T22:19:44-0600 [-] Loaded output engine: jsonlog
2017-11-27T22:19:44-0600 [-] Loaded output engine: mysql
...
2017-11-27T22:19:58-0600 [-] Ready to accept SSH connections

## Confirm That Events are Logged to the MySQL Database Wait for a new login attempt to occur. Use tail like before to quickly check if any activity has been recorded in the cowrie.log file.

Once a login event has occurred, log back into the MySQL database and verify that the event was recorded:

$ mysql -u cowrie -p
USE cowrie;
SELECT * FROM auth;
``

Example output:

+----+--------------+---------+----------+-------------+---------------------+
| id | session      | success | username | password    | timestamp           |
+----+--------------+---------+----------+-------------+---------------------+
|  1 | a551c0a74e06 |       0 | root     | 12345       | 2017-11-27 23:15:56 |
|  2 | a551c0a74e06 |       0 | root     | seiko2005   | 2017-11-27 23:15:58 |
|  3 | a551c0a74e06 |       0 | root     | anko        | 2017-11-27 23:15:59 |
|  4 | a551c0a74e06 |       0 | root     | 123456      | 2017-11-27 23:16:00 |
|  5 | a551c0a74e06 |       0 | root     | dreambox    | 2017-11-27 23:16:01 |
...