What is this?

Acra Poison Records Demo illustrates how to use intrusion detection functionality of Acra data protection suite. For intrusion detection, Acra uses poison records, also known as honey tokens. This demo shows how to setup, configure, and use intrusion detection in Acra.

This project is one of numerous Acra’s example applications. If you are curious about other Acra features, like transparent encryption, SQL firewall, load balancing support – Acra Example Applications.

How poison records work?

Poison records are records specifically designed to sit quietly in the database and not be queried by legitimate users under normal circumstances. They look like any other encrypted records, and it’s impossible to distinguish them from “normal data”. Technically speaking, poison records are data (binary or strings, int, or whatever suits your database design), placed in particular tables / columns / cells.

However, poison records will only be included in the outputs of requests from malicious applications that read more data than they should, i.e. using SELECT * requests. The sole purpose of these requests is that when an unauthorised leakage occurs, poison records will be present in database response and detected by AcraServer. AcraServer will inform user (system administrator) of untypical behaviour and can block suspicious requests.

Related blog posts and docs:

• Explain Like I’m Five: Poison Records (Honeypots for Database Tables)
• Poison Records In Acra – Database Honeypots For Intrusion Detection
• Acra docs on intrusion detection

How to run the example project

Installation

1. Use docker-compose command to set up and run the whole infrastructure:

docker-compose -f docker-infrastructure.yml up

This will deploy PostgreSQL database and AcraServer in transparent mode of operations.

2. Let’s check that those containers are running:

docker ps -a

You should see two containers up and running, and another two in “exited” state (acra-keymaker and acra-poisonrecordmaker). These containers were used to generate encryption keys for data and poison records themselves. They finished their mission and stopped.

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                                       COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS                     PORTS                              NAMES
dfcc0e58e111        cossacklabs/acra-server:latest              "/acra-server --conf…"   2 minutes ago       Up 2 minutes               9090/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9393->9393/tcp   acra-poison-records-demo_acra-server_1
2601ddf7fb7b        postgres:11                                 "docker-entrypoint.s…"   2 minutes ago       Up 2 minutes               0.0.0.0:5432->5432/tcp             acra-poison-records-demo_postgresql_1
9726f9355f56        cossacklabs/acra-keymaker:latest            "/acra-keymaker --cl…"   2 minutes ago       Exited (0) 2 minutes ago                                      acra-poison-records-demo_acra-keymaker_server_1
ac0ca175f5be        cossacklabs/acra-poisonrecordmaker:latest   "./acra-poisonrecord…"   2 minutes ago       Exited (0) 2 minutes ago                                      acra-poison-records-demo_acra-poisonrecordmaker_1

Run demo app

Install dependencies and run demo application from repository folder. The demo application is very simple, it works as database client application: connects to the database, creates test table, add some encrypted data, add poison records, reads data using SELECT query.

go run demo/demo.go --create

If no errors occurred, you should see log that table was created:

2022/03/19 13:53:44 Table has been successfully created

Fill in the database table with data

Insert some data into the table by running client application again, for example, here we add 10 rows:

go run demo/demo.go --insert 10

If no errors, you should see:

2022/03/19 13:53:47 Insert has been successful

Client application adds some random data to the database but AcraServer sits transparently between app and database and encrypts all the data before storing in the database.

Read the database table (aka steal all data)

Let’s check that we can read data from the table. Run client application with --select command.

go run demo/demo.go --select

If no errors, you should see all records:

1       yourheadisdewt8 P!RG3TVf+dL     [email protected]
2       peasmak1234k6   f2S38V5RO41     [email protected]
3       pagsulat08      A49vnzT9Sb*     [email protected]
4       madalianop      D962&6M7tsi     [email protected]
5       shotgunroseswu  D962&6M7tsi     [email protected]
6       anderswerdenod  giMOcrdOhz4     [email protected]
7       Buschborn6h     6G&8k-8R&_@     [email protected]
8       uvideli2d       D962&6M7tsi     [email protected]
9       macatsvy        1QH!k0_ZVk#     [email protected]
10      anderswerdenod  LsRD%**0z2g     [email protected]
2022/03/19 14:04:03 Select has been successful

So we just downloaded all the content of the table. If we were attackers, we’d have successfully stolen all the data. As attackers, we could use some SQL injection to perform SELECT * query.

Add poison records to prevent leak

Now we will add poison record to the table to detect an attack. Get the value of poison record data from the logs of exited acra-poisonrecordmaker container and then insert it into a table:

docker logs acra-poison-records-demo-acra-poisonrecordmaker-1

If no errors, you should see base64 encoded value of poison record, it looks like encrypted data that we already have in the database (or like garbage):

IiIiIiIiIiJVRUMyAAAALaxV9EIC3i/fAgKysyzZUerLzfS17l72WKaFvnLidd8puf0xJfkgJwQmVAAAAAABAUAMAAAAEAAAACAAAABI15gRoCor8GWbMgamOioeaeZr149b/qk1LGpfSJ0+kHrtBNdP0rwKcdh0zsZgAnHZnRkXonklDDO4d4ZDAAAAAAAAAAABAUAMAAAAEAAAABcAAAAZDRadADVJbcS4CZ4hI0vAMh6em+Dy/B48xtoOfdWEQyYibGwDjUtp8pydV41ZQ91SU2U=

Copy poison record from your log of your acra-poisonrecordmaker and insert it to the database table:

go run demo/demo.go --insert_poison IiIiIiIiIiJVRUMyAAAALWSWDMcDH/+0AgCR2bsCZZW47bPtG+WtSD6Riq1PX/NxL1pCpeUgJwQmVAAAAAABAUAMAAAAEAAAACAAAABQeXSzlAcOIYtObhgHLTzGdCKFoEcoBJdtSjmxRtbTZplrFMQMTz15Ieww2FRBbSFN8sH0+pRmtjVxTEWEAAAAAAAAAAABAUAMAAAAEAAAAFgAAAB8UwNKO/MhI0ECetlJfELaqao/L1/WpvrEpGkol2h4MJIl4Mjo2CfEoAICOcJcbfeHPcKCCTtnUFgRhA4b0998U0j5bqBmmFvANHK0mPJMS37xWeLErxUtH/LgJ6ZdDYGg2/TkfS1+cxR/MLuJ93Nkrlf9VQ==

If no errors show, you should see base64 encoded value of poison record:

2022/03/19 14:05:42 Poison record insert has been successful

Try to steal data again

Now we are protected from malicious SELECT * queries. Try to read all the data again:

go run demo/demo.go --select

You should see:

1       yourheadisdewt8 P!RG3TVf+dL     [email protected]
2       peasmak1234k6   f2S38V5RO41     [email protected]
3       pagsulat08      A49vnzT9Sb*     [email protected]
4       madalianop      D962&6M7tsi     [email protected]
5       shotgunroseswu  D962&6M7tsi     [email protected]
6       anderswerdenod  giMOcrdOhz4     [email protected]
7       Buschborn6h     6G&8k-8R&_@     [email protected]
8       uvideli2d       D962&6M7tsi     [email protected]
9       macatsvy        1QH!k0_ZVk#     [email protected]
10      anderswerdenod  LsRD%**0z2g     [email protected]
2022/03/19 14:06:02 read tcp 127.0.0.1:51044->127.0.0.1:9393: read: connection reset by peer
exit status 1

Also, check the console where you run infrastructure. You should see that poison records has been detected by AcraServer:

acra-poison-records-demo-acra-server-1             | time="2022-03-19T12:06:02Z" level=warning msg="Recognized poison record" client_id=poison_records_demo code=587 session_id=5
acra-poison-records-demo-acra-server-1             | time="2022-03-19T12:06:02Z" level=warning msg="Recognized poison record"
acra-poison-records-demo-acra-server-1             | time="2022-03-19T12:06:02Z" level=warning msg="Detected poison record, exit" code=101
acra-poison-records-demo-acra-server-1 exited with code 1

It means that AcraServer detected poison record and stopped working (shut down itself). Note, that you can setup AcraServer to different behaviour when it detects poison record:

• perform a shut-down (useful for very critical data, but AcraServer will be down until you restart it)
• run a script (you can tell AcraServer to run a script after detecting poison record, for example, to send alerts to system administrators and SIEMs)
• perform a shut-down and run a script

Further steps

Let us know if you have any questions by dropping an email to [email protected].

1. Acra features – check out full features set and available licenses.
2. Other Acra example applications – try other Acra features, like transparent encryption, SQL firewall, load balancing support.

Need help?

Need help in configuring Acra? Our support is available for Acra Pro and Acra Enterprise versions.