Velociraptor

Velociraptor is a digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) tool for interrogating endpoints.

Use Tenzir to conveniently speak with a Velociraptor server over the gRPC API.

Create a TLS certificate to communicate with Velociraptor

The velociraptor acts as client and establishes a connection to a Velociraptor server via gRPC. All Velociraptor client-to-server communication is mutually authenticated and encrypted via TLS certificates. This means you must provide a client-side certificate, which you can generate as follows. (Velociraptor ships as a static binary that we refer to as velociraptor-binary here.)

1. Create a server configuration server.yaml:

   velociraptor-binary config generate > server.yaml

2. Create an API client:

   velociraptor-binary -c server.yaml config api_client --name tenzir client.yaml

   Copy the generated client.yaml to your Tenzir plugin configuration directory as velociraptor.yaml so that the operator can find it:

   cp client.yaml /etc/tenzir/plugin/velociraptor.yaml

3. Create a user (e.g., an admin named tenzir):

   velociraptor-binary -v -c server.yaml user add --role administrator tenzir

4. Run the frontend with the server configuration:

   velociraptor-binary -c server.yaml frontend

Run raw VQL

After you have created a TLS certificate, you can use the velociraptor operator to execute a Velociraptor Query Language (VQL) query:

velociraptor --query "select * from pslist()"
| select Name, Pid, PPid, CommandLine
| where Name == "remotemanagement"

Subscribe to forensic artifacts

You can also hunt for forensic artifacts, such as dropped files or specific entries in the Windows registry, on assets connected to your Velociraptor server. Every time a client reports back on an artifact that matches a given Regex, e.g., Windows or Windows.Sys.StartupItems, the Velociraptor server sends the result into the pipeline.

For example, run this pipeline to subscribe to an artifact collection of Windows startup items and import them into a node:

velociraptor --subscribe Windows.Sys.StartupItems | import

For additional information, read our blog post Integrating Velociraptor into Tenzir Pipelines.