The Elastic Container Project – Streamlining Security Research With A Quick Setup Guide

Stand up a 100% containerized Elastic stack, TLS secured, with Elasticsearch, Kibana, Fleet, and the Detection Engine all pre-configured, enabled and ready to use, within minutes.

If you’re interested in more details regarding this project and what to do once you have it running, check out our blog post on the Elastic Security Labs site.

This is not an Elastic created, sponsored, or maintained project. Elastic is not responsible for this projects design or implementation.

Steps

Git clone this repo
Install prerequisites (see below)
Change into the elastic-container/ folder
Change the default password of changeme in the .env file (don’t change the elastic username, it’s a required built-in user)
Bulk enable pre-built detection rules by OS in the .env file (not required, see usage below)
Make the elastic-container.sh shell script executable by running chmod +x elastic-container.sh
Execute the elastic-container.sh shell script with the start argument ./elastic-container start
Wait for the prompt to tell you to browse
(You may be presented a browser warning due to the self-signed certificates. You can type thisisnotsafe or click to proceed after which you will be directed to the Elastic log in screen)

Requirements

Prerequisites:

Docker suite, jq, curl, and git.

You can use the links above, the Linux package install commands below, or Homebrew if your’e on MacOS

MacOS:

brew install jq git curl docker-compose
brew install --cask docker

Once we have Docker installed we need to provide it with privileged access for it to function. Run the following command to open the Docker app and follow the proceeding steps.

open /Applications/Docker.app

Confirm you would like to open the app
Select ok when prompted to provide Docker with privileged access
Enter your password
Close or minimize the Docker app

Ubuntu:
Please follow the Docker installation instructions. Of specific note, you must install the docker-compose-plugin, which is different than docker-compose.

apt-get install jq git curl

CentOS/Fedora:
Please follow the Docker installation instructions. Of specific note, you must install the docker-compose-plugin, which is different than docker-compose.

dnf install jq git curl

Other Linux distributions:
Please follow the Docker installation instructions. Of specific note, you must install the docker-compose-plugin, which is different than docker-compose.

Arch Linux users should install inetutils and change the shell script from hostname -I to hostname -i.

Windows 10/11 with WSL 2 (Ubuntu 20.04):
Make sure you are using WSL version 2. You can check the version using wsl -l -v in PowerShell. If the version is wrong you can change it with wsl --set-version Ubuntu-20.04 2

apt-get update
apt-get install jq git curl

Please follow the Docker installation instructions. Of specific note, you must install the docker-compose-plugin, which is different than docker-compose.

Once the Docker suite is installed run sudo service docker start to start it.

Usage

This uses default creds of elastic:changeme and is intended purely for security research on a local Elastic stack. Change the password in the .env file. Don’t change the elastic username, it’s a required built-in user

This should not be Internet exposed or used in a production environment.

Enable Pre-Built Detection Rules

If you want to bulk enable Elastic’s pre-built detection rules by OS, on startup, you can change the value of the chosen OS in the .env file from 0 to 1.

# Bulk Enable Detection Rules by OS
LinuxDR=0

WindowsDR=1

MacOSDR=0

Starting

If you have not changed the default passwords in the .env file, the script will exit.

Starting will:

create a network called elastic
download the Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Elastic-Agent Docker images defined in the script
start Elasticsearch, Kibana, and the Elastic-Agent configured as a Fleet Server w/all settings needed for Fleet and the Detection Engine

$ ./elastic-container.sh start

...
 ⠿ Container elasticsearch-security-setup  Healthy 7.3s
 ⠿ Container elasticsearch                 Healthy 39.3s
 ⠿ Container kibana                        Healthy 59.3s
 ⠿ Container elastic-agent                 Started 59.7s

Attempting to enable the Detection Engine and Prebuilt-Detection Rules

Kibana is up. Proceeding

Detection engine enabled. Installing prepackaged rules.

Prepackaged rules installed!

Waiting 40 seconds for Fleet Server setup

Populating Fleet Settings

READY SET GO!

Browse to https://localhost:5601
Username: elastic
Passphrase: not-the-default!

After a few minutes, when prompted, browse to and log in with your configured credentials.

Destroying

Destroying will:

stop the Elasticsearch and Kibana containers
delete the Elasticsearch and Kibana containers
delete the elastic container network
delete the created volumes

$ ./elastic-container.sh destroy

fleet-server
kibana
elasticsearch
elastic

Stopping

Stopping will:

stop the Elasticsearch and Kibana containers without deleting them
(4/4/2023) We’re tracking an issue where if you don’t run the stop command, and then reboot the host, the Fleet server can’t retain its state and fails. Please run stop before rebooting the host that is running the stack

$ ./elastic-container.sh stop

fleet-server
kibana
elasticsearch
elastic

Restarting

Restarting will:

restart all the containers

$ ./elastic-container.sh restart

elasticsearch
kibana
fleet-server

Status

Requesting the status will:

return the current status of the running containers

$ ./elastic-container.sh status

NAMES: STATUS
fleet-server: Up 6 minutes
kibana: Up 6 minutes
elasticsearch: Up 6 minutes

Clearing

Clearing will :

clear all documents in logs and metrics indices

$ ./elastic-container.sh clear

Successfully cleared logs data stream
Successfully cleared metrics data stream

Staging

Staging the container images will:

download all container images to your local system, but will not start them

$ ./elastic-container.sh stage

8.6.0: Pulling from elasticsearch/elasticsearch
e7bd69ff4774: Pull complete
d0a0f12aaf30: Pull complete
...

Modifying

In .env, the variables are defined, below are the variables that can be changed. You must change the default passwords.

ELASTIC_PASSWORD="changeme"
KIBANA_PASSWORD="changeme"
STACK_VERSION="8.10.2"

STACK_VERSION="8.10.2"

If you want to change the default values, simply replace whatever is appropriate in the variable declaration.

If you want to use different Elastic Stack versions, you can change those as well. Optional values are on Elastic’s Docker hub:

Tamil S

Tamil has a great interest in the fields of Cyber Security, OSINT, and CTF projects. Currently, he is deeply involved in researching and publishing various security tools with Kali Linux Tutorials, which is quite fascinating.