CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

The n6 project uses a versioning scheme distinct from Semantic Versioning. Each n6 version's identifier consists of three integer numbers, separated with . (e.g.: 4.11.2). We can say it is in the <FOREMOST>.<MAJOR>.<MINOR> format -- where:

• <MINOR> is incremented on changes that are backwards compatible from the point of view of users, sysadmins and backend programmers. Note that such changes may still be backwards incompatible regarding any code or feature which is considered non-public or experimental (by convention or because it is explicitly marked as such), any n6 Portal frontend internals (all JS/TS code and all HTML/CSS/etc.) as well as the documentation/experimentation/examples-focused stuff in the docker/, docs/ and etc/ directories.

• <MAJOR> is incremented on more significant changes -- which typically are backwards incompatible from the point of view of users, sysadmins or backend programmers.

• <FOREMOST> is incremented very rarely, only for big milestone releases.

Some features of this document's layout were inspired by Keep a Changelog.

4.12.0 (2024-12-23)

Features, Changes, Fixes...

• [setup, lib, etc/docker] Debian 12 (bookworm) and CPython 3.11 are now the officially recommended operating system and Python implementation.

• [data sources] New data sources: turris-cz.greylist-csv (collector and parser), withaname.ddosia (collector and parser) and shadowserver.bgp (just another shadowerver parser).

• [data sources] Changed the shadowserver.ftp parser's constant value of the name event attribute to "ftp allow password wo ssl" (previously it was "ftp, clear text pass").

• [data sources] Fixed a bug in the abuse-ch.urlhaus-urls collector: removed the (mistakenly kept) rigid limit on numbers of events being sent.

• [data sources] Removed the malwarepatrol.malurl collector.

• [portal, rest api, stream api, admin panel, data pipeline] Added a new feature: Ignore Lists. From now on, n6 administrators/operators can use Admin Panel to create and manage Ignore Lists, each identified by a unique label, with optional comment, flagged as active or not, and -- what is most interesting -- containing any number of Ignored IP Networks (note: bare IP addresses as also accepted; they are automatically converted to .../32 networks). The n6filter component will mark -- with the ignored event field set to True -- each event that contains the address field whose value is a non-empty list that contains only such dicts whose ip item's value matches at least one Ignored IP Network belonging to any active Ignore List (note that Ignore Lists are active by default); any other events are marked with ignored set to False. For non-privileged users (whose organizations have full_access=False in the Auth DB), results generated by Portal, REST API, Stream API/n6anonymizer and n6counter/n6notifier (as well as by Test REST API and Test Stream API/n6stream_test_api_generator) do not include events marked as ignored. On the other hand, for privileged users (whose organizations have full_access=True in the Auth DB), results generated by those n6 components do include also such events, but then all events contain the ignored field (set to True or False) -- except that Stream API/n6anonymizer (and Test Stream API/n6stream_test_api_generator) always treat all users as if they were non-privileged. Additionally, privileged users can filter results from REST API's/Portal API's by using a new query parameter: ignored (Boolean).

• [portal, admin panel, docs] Added a new feature: Organization Agreements. It allows the administrators of an n6 instance to use Admin Panel to define optional terms/agreements which then can be accepted/rejected by the existing and new (future) users of n6, via Portal, on behalf of their organizations. The new feature is comprehensively documented.

• [portal, admin panel] Enhanced the Edit organization settings form in the Portal frontend and the corresponding backend stuff as well as the related Admin Panel stuff -- to allow adding and/or removing users within the logger user's organization (actually: requesting n6 administrators to, respectively, add/re-activate and/or deactivate those users...).

• [portal, rest api, stream api, data sources, data pipeline, event db, lib] The name event field (event attribute) is now coerced by the n6 data pipeline's machinery (namely, by n6lib.record_dict.RecordDict...) to pure ASCII (by replacing each non-ASCII character with ?), and is, generally, required by all other parts of n6 to be pure ASCII... (However, when it comes to how events' id are computed by parsers, efforts have been made to keep that unaffected by the coercion -- so that resultant id values remain the same as previously for the same input values of name.) Events stored in the Event DB are now also expected to have name (if present) already coerced that way. (See also the descriptions of the Event-DB-related changes below...)

• [portal, rest api, data pipeline, event db, lib] The count event field (event attribute) is no longer constrained to be less than 32768 (now its maximum value is 4294967295 which seems big enough for any practical purposes...). Therefore, n6aggregator does not set the count_actual field anymore. (See also the descriptions of the Event-DB-related changes below...)

• [portal, rest api, data pipeline, event db, lib] Non-BMP Unicode characters (i.e., Unicode codepoints greater than 0xFFFF) are now properly supported (if present) in values of the url and target event fields (attributes), i.e., now they can be reliably stored in the Event DB and retrieved from the Event DB. (Previously, that was broken, because the MariaDB's legacy max-3-bytes charset utf8 was used for the Event DB. See also the descriptions of the Event-DB-related changes below...)

• [portal, rest api, event db, lib] Filtering the results by the url event field (attribute) -- by using the url or url.sub query parameter -- is now stricter in some ways, because the underlying MariaDB collation (for the Event DB's column url in the event table) changed from utf8_unicode_ci to utf8mb4_bin (in particular, now url values are compared in a case-sensitive manner).

• [portal, rest api, event db, lib] Filtering the results by the target event field (attribute) may behave in a slightly different way, because the underlying MariaDB collation (for the Event DB's column target in the event table) changed from utf8_unicode_ci to utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci.

• [portal, rest api, event db, lib] The modified event field (attribute) is now required (i.e., guaranteed to be present in every event). See also the descriptions of the Event-DB-related changes below...

• [portal, rest api, data pipeline, auth db, lib] Implemented several performance enhancements/fixes and optimizations regarding retrieving and caching authorization data from the Auth DB (that is, concerning the stuff implemented in the n6lib.auth_api module and related modules; the addition of the recent_write_op_commit Auth DB table, mentioned later, is also related to that). One of those enhancements is a new optional mechanism called pickle cache (see the related configuration options mentioned later...).

• [portal, rest api, lib] n6lib.db_events.n6NormalizedData.like_query(): fixed a bug causing injecting LIKE's wildcards when querying REST API or Portal API using query parameters url.sub/fqdn.sub (SQL pattern injection). It was not a security problem, but it might cause that too large results (supersets of correct results) would be obtained for queries involving the affected parameters.

• [portal, lib] n6lib.pyramid_commons.mfa_helpers: fixed the value and the use of MFA_CODE_MAX_VALIDITY_DURATION_IN_SECONDS (previously named MFA_CODE_MAX_ACCEPTABLE_AGE_IN_SECONDS). Before the fix, if a Portal user successfully used an MFA code to log in, doing that "too early" but still within that MFA code's validity period (making use of the clock drift tolerance feature), it was then possible, for the same user, to successfully use the same MFA code once again, by doing that sufficiently late yet still within the same validity period. The crux of the bug was that the period of treating MFA codes as "already spent" was too short. (Note that the fixed bug does not look like a serious security flaw.)

• [portal] Applied many GUI/UX-related Portal fixes and enhancements... Among others, from now on, dates/times on the Incidents page are consistently processed/presented using UTC times; also, support for some additional search parameters have been added.

• [stream api, auth db, lib] Since now, all new organization have Stream API enabled by default (as the default value of the stream_api_enabled field of the n6lib.auth_db.models.Org model is now True).

• [admin panel, lib] All editable fields in the Admin Panel accepting an IP network (in the CIDR notation) now also accept a bare IP address (which is automatically converted to a .../32 network). What has actually been changed is the validation procedure for all ip_network fields defined in n6lib.auth_db.models.... (To make that possible, n6sdk.data_spec.fields.IPv4NetField, and all its subclasses, gained a new option: accept_bare_ip -- of type bool, specifiable as a keyword argument to the constructor or a subclass attribute, with False as the default value).

• [admin panel, lib] Added a new column, Is Active, to the Admin Panel's User list view; the new column represents a newly added property of n6lib.auth_db.models.User: is_active -- whose value is always a logical negation of the (already existing) User model's field is_blocked (representing the user Auth DB table's column is_blocked).

• [docs] The n6's documentation: added a new article: n6 REST API; significantly improved/updated two existing articles: n6 Stream API and Docker-Based Installation; applied a bunch of fixes, improvements and updates to other parts of the documentation.

System/Configuration/Programming-Only

• [event db, lib] Made numerous changes to the schema and basic setup of the Event DB (see, in particular, the etc/mysql/initdb/*.sql files...). Namely: the MariaDB engine used for the Event DB is now RocksDB (rather than TokuDB); the general Event DB's character set and collation (that apply, among others, to the name column in the event table...) are now ascii and ascii_general_ci (rather than the legacy max-3-bytes charset utf8 with the collation utf8_unicode_ci), except that, in the event table, the character set and collation for the url column are now utf8mb4 and utf8mb4_bin, and the character set and collation for the target column are now utf8mb4 and utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci; the order of the components of the event table's primary key is now: time, ip, id (previously: id, time, ip); the event table's columns modified and dip are now NOT NULL (in the case of dip, the value 0 means that there is no actual value; actually, for the dip column, this convention has been used for a long time); the event table's columns dport and sport are now of type SMALLINT UNSIGNED (previously: INTEGER, which was an unnecessary waste of space); the event table's column cc is now of type CHAR(2) (previously: VARCHAR(2)); the event table's column count is now of type INTEGER UNSIGNED whose max. value is 4294967295 (previously: SMALLINT with max. value 32767, which was far too small); several database indexes have been added/adjusted/removed; also, as a part of implementation of the aforementioned Ignore Lists feature, a new column has been added to the event table: ignored, of type BOOL; apart from all that, several SQL variables are now consistently set to sensible values (max_allowed_packet, sql_mode, time_zone)... What is important from the point of view of the administrators of an n6 instance is that a suitable migration of the whole production Event DB content needs to be performed (manually).

• [auth db, lib] Added, as a part of implementation of the aforementioned Ignore Lists feature, two new Auth DB tables: ignore_list and ignored_ip_network. Apart from that, added new Auth DB tables related to other features/mechanisms (also mentioned above...): agreement, org_agreement_link, org_config_update_request_user_addition_or_activation_request, org_config_update_request_user_deactivation_request, recent_write_op_commit, registration_request_agreement_link. Obviously, related model classes have been added as needed (see n6lib.auth_db.models) and any necessary field validators have been implemented (see n6lib.auth_db.validators). What is important from the point of view of the administrators of an n6 instance is that the Alembic migrations machinery needs to be used to update the schema of the production Auth DB (for the instructions how to do it, see N6Lib/n6lib/auth_db/alembic/README.md).

• [config, data pipeline] From now on, the n6recorder's configuration option connect_charset (in the configuration section recorder) is expected to be set to the value utf8mb4 (not to the value utf8 anymore!) -- unless there are some special circumstances and you really now what you are doing, and why!

• [config, portal, rest api] From now on, the configuration option sqlalchemy_event_db_connect_charset (in REST API's and Portal API's *.ini files) is expected to be set to the value utf8mb4 (not to the value utf8 anymore!) -- unless there are some special circumstances and you really now what you are doing, and why!

• [config, data sources] The collectors whose classes inherit (directly or indirectly) from n6datasources.collectors.base.BaseDownloadingCollector now support a new configuration option, download_timeout, which can be set to customize HTTP(s) request timeouts.

• [data pipeline] Added a new auxiliary executable: n6exchange_updater -- to update Stream-API-related AMQP exchange declarations and bindings (adding and deleting them as appropriate), according to the relevant Stream API settings in Auth DB. (The implementation of the component resides in the n6datapipeline.aux.exchange_updater module.)

• [config, portal, rest api] New configuration options regarding certain performance improvement mechanisms can now be specified in the REST API's and Portal API's *.ini file (see the auth api prefetching configuration part of the relevant configuration prototype files). In particular, the aforementioned optional mechanism called pickle cache can be activated (see the comments in the related configuration prototype files regarding the options auth_api_prefetching.pickle_cache_dir and auth_api_prefetching.pickle_cache_signature_secret; please, take seriously the security considerations those comments include...).

• [config, portal] A new configuration option, session_cookie_sign_secret, can now be specified in the Portal API's *.ini file to explicitly set the secret key to be used to sign user session cookies (please, see the comments in the related configuration prototype files regarding that option...). By default, the option's value is empty, causing the legacy behavior (a new secret to sign session cookies being automatically generated on each start of the Portal API server application). Note: setting the option is necessary if the Portal API server application is run using multiple OS processes (not just threads), otherwise user sessions cannot be handled properly.

• [config, portal, rest api, broker auth api, admin panel, data sources, data pipeline] From now on, wherever in n6 an AMQP connection is established, authentication to RabbitMQ (the AMQP server) can be configured to be made using the PLAIN mechanism, i.e., with username and password (note: SSL-based EXTERNAL authentication with an X.509 client certificate is still possible, just no longer as the only option). To learn how to configure your n6 components to use the newly supported method of authentication, see respective comments in the relevant config prototype files: ad source/pipeline components -- 00_global.conf; ad input for collectors based on n6datasources.collectors.AMQPCollector -- 60_amqp.conf; ad logging using n6lib.log_helpers.AMQPHandler -- either logging.conf or production.ini (the latter -- only ad Portal API and REST API). Note that on production systems, regardless of the authentication mechanism, you should use only connections secured with SSL (TLS).

• [config, portal, rest api, broker auth api, admin panel, data sources, data pipeline] From now on, in configuration files for any n6 components, any configuration options that specify filesystem paths or lists of filesystem paths are expected to be absolute paths, i.e., relative paths might no longer be accepted. Note that paths like ~/something and ~user/something (intended to be expanded by replacing a ~/~user marker with the user's home directory path) are still OK.

• [setup, lib, admin panel] Updated versions of some external dependencies (including some security-related cases...); also, added a few new dependencies.

• [lib, portal, rest api, broker auth api, admin panel, data sources, data pipeline, config, cli, docs, etc/docker, tests] Made a bunch of various changes/enhancements (including backward incompatible ones) and additions to the code and documentation (many related to the features and changes mentioned above...), plus various fixes/cleanups, some refactoring, modernization and adjustments/updates (among other things, many changes to accommodate some of the major Event-DB-related changes described above; as well as certain temporary hacks to ease the transition process)... Also, many tests (with data/fixtures/helpers) have been added, enhanced, fixed, refactored, adjusted/updated... More or less the same can be said about many n6 components' configuration prototype files, and about some other configuration-or-Docker-related stuff...

• [portal, setup, tests] Regarding the implementation of the n6 Portal's frontend (React-based TS/JS code and related resources, together with development tooling): made a bunch of additions, fixes/changes/enhancements as well as some refactoring/modernization, plus external package updates and additions... Among others, upgraded Node, React and TypeScript, and implemented a comprehensive Jest-based test suite...

• [etc/docker, docs] Added Mailhog to the Docker-related stuff.

Programming-Only

• [lib] Removed some constants/classes/methods/attributes/functions, in particular: n6lib.data_backend_api.N6DataBackendAPI.EVENT_DB_LEGACY_CHARSET, n6lib.data_selection_tools.CondPredicateMaker.visit_RecItemParamCond() (replaced with visit_RecItemCond(), mentioned below), n6lib.db_events.CustomInteger, n6lib.db_events.JSONText (replaced with JSONMediumText, mentioned below), n6lib.db_events.n6ClientToEvent.__json__(), n6lib.db_events.n6NormalizedData.to_raw_result_dict(), n6lib.ldap_api_replacement.LdapAPIConnectionError, n6lib.pyramid_commons.mfa_helpers.MFA_CODE_MAX_ACCEPTABLE_AGE_IN_SECONDS, (replaced with MFA_CODE_MAX_VALIDITY_DURATION_IN_SECONDS, mentioned below).

• [lib] Added a new module: n6lib.file_helpers (providing three utility classes: FileAccessor, StampedFileAccessor and SignedStampedFileAccessor; and one utility function: as_path(); see their docstrings for more information...).

• [lib, data sources] Added numerous constants/classes/methods/attributes/functions, in particular: n6datasources.base.parsers.BaseParser.ignored_csv_raw_row_prefixes (and overridden, as appropriate, in some subclasses of BaseParser...), n6lib.amqp_helpers.AMQPConnectionParamsError, n6lib.amqp_helpers.GUEST_PASSWORD, n6lib.amqp_helpers.GUEST_USERNAME, n6lib.amqp_helpers.MIN_REQUIRED_PASSWORD_LENGTH, n6lib.amqp_helpers.get_amqp_connection_params_dict_from_args.set_log_warning_func(), n6lib.amqp_helpers.SimpleAMQPExchangeTool, n6lib.auth_api.AuthAPI.get_ignore_lists_criteria_resolver(), n6lib.auth_db.fields.HTTPAbsoluteURLField, n6lib.auth_db.models.Agreement, n6lib.auth_db.models.IgnoredIPNetwork, n6lib.auth_db.models.IgnoreList, n6lib.auth_db.models.Org.agreements, n6lib.auth_db.models.org_agreement_link, n6lib.auth_db.models.OrgConfigUpdateRequest.user_addition_or_activation_requests, n6lib.auth_db.models.OrgConfigUpdateRequest.user_deactivation_requests, n6lib.auth_db.models.OrgConfigUpdateRequestUserAdditionOrActivationRequest, n6lib.auth_db.models.OrgConfigUpdateRequestUserDeactivationRequest, n6lib.auth_db.models.RecentWriteOpCommit, n6lib.auth_db.models.RegistrationRequest.agreements, n6lib.auth_db.models.registration_request_agreement_link, n6lib.auth_db.models.User.is_active, n6lib.class_helpers.LackOf, n6lib.common_helpers.ip_int_to_str() (+ n6sdk.addr_helpers.ip_int_to_str()), n6lib.common_helpers.PY_NON_ASCII_ESCAPED_WITH_BACKSLASHREPLACE_HANDLER_REGEX (+ n6sdk.regexes.PY_NON_ASCII_ESCAPED_WITH_BACKSLASHREPLACE_HANDLER_REGEX), n6lib.data_backend_api.N6DataBackendAPI.EVENT_DB_CONNECT_CHARSET_DEFAULT, n6lib.data_backend_api.N6DataBackendAPI.EVENT_DB_SQL_MODE, n6lib.data_selection_tools.IsTrueCond, n6lib.data_selection_tools.CondBuilder.RecItemCondBuilder.is_true(), n6lib.data_selection_tools.CondPredicateMaker.visit_RecItemCond(), n6lib.data_spec.N6DataSpec.ignored (a new event field specification), n6lib.db_events.JSONMediumText, n6lib.db_events.n6NormalizedData.single_flag_query(), n6lib.ldap_api_replacement.LdapAPI.peek_database_ver_and_timestamp(), n6lib.pyramid_commons.mfa_helpers.DELAY_TO_BE_SURE_THAT_MFA_CODE_EXPIRES, n6lib.pyramid_commons.mfa_helpers.MFA_CODE_MAX_VALIDITY_DURATION_IN_SECONDS, n6lib.record_dict.N6DataSpecWithOptionalModified, n6lib.record_dict.RecordDict.adjust_ignore(), n6lib.sqlalchemy_related_test_helpers.sqlalchemy_type_to_str(), n6lib.threaded_async.Future.peek_result(). n6lib.typing_helpers.HashObj.

4.5.0 (2023-11-29)

Features and Notable Changes

System/Configuration/Programming-Only

• [data sources, setup, config, etc/docker, tests] Globally renamed the spamhaus.edrop parser's class SpamhausEdrop202303Parser (defined in n6datasources.parsers.spamhaus and referred to in a few other places -- in particular, being the name of the-parser-dedicated configuration section!) to SpamhausEdropParser, as well as the executable script n6parser_spamhausedrop202303 to n6parser_spamhausedrop; also, fixed n6datasources.tests.parsers.test_spamhaus.TestSpamhausEdropParser by removing its attribute PARSER_RAW_FORMAT_VERSION_TAG. The rationale for these changes is that no raw format version tag has ever been assigned to the spamhaus.edrop parser.

Less Notable Changes and Fixes

• [data pipeline, lib] n6filter: fixed a bug (in the machinery of n6lib.auth_api.InsideCriteriaResolver...) related to event ownership criteria (aka "inside" resource events criteria) regarding the very unlikely (yet not impossible) corner case of the 0.0.0.0/32 IP network defined as such a criterion in the Auth DB... The bug might make n6filter reject all incoming data (because of raised exceptions).

• [tests, docs] Non-major enhancements and fixes regarding some unit tests and documentation.

Programming-Only

• [tests] n6datasources.tests.parsers._parser_test_mixin: enhanced certain ParserTestMixin-provided checks related to raw format version tags.

4.4.0 (2023-11-23)

Features and Notable Changes

• [data sources, config] Added support for the shadowserver.msmq source (by adding the parser for it, as there already exists one common collector for all shadowserver.* sources; obviously, appropriate additions have been made in the collector's and parser's sections in the N6DataSources/n6datasources/data/conf/60_shadowserver.conf config prototype file).

• [data sources, config] Removed support for the following sources: blueliv.map and darklist-de.bl (removed both collectors and parsers!) as well as shadowserver.modbus (removed just this source's parser).

• [data sources] The parsers for the dataplane.* sources have been changed to support the current data format (there was a need to change the delimiter and the row parsing mechanism...).

• [data sources] The collector for the abuse-ch.ssl-blacklist source (implemented in n6datasources.collectors.abuse_ch as the class named AbuseChSslBlacklistCollector) used to be able to load the collector state in a legacy format related to the value of the class attribute row_time_legacy_state_key -- that format is no longer supported, as the base class _BaseAbuseChDownloadingTimeOrderedRowsCollect no longer makes use of that attribute. Note: these changes are relevant and breaking only if you need to load your collector state in that old format -- almost certainly you do not.

• [data sources] A new processing mechanism has been added to numerous existing parsers for shadowserver.* sources (by enhancing the _BaseShadowserverParser class, defined in the n6datasources.parsers.shadowserver module) -- concerning events categorized as "amplifier". The mechanism is activated when a CVE-...-like-regex-based match is found in the tag field of the input data -- then the parser, apart from yielding an event (hereinafter referred to as a basic event) with category set to "amplifier", also yields an extra event -- which is identical to the basic one, except that its category is set to "vulnerable" and its name is set to the regex-matched value (which is, basically, the CVE identifier). Because of that, name and category should no longer be declared as parser's constant_items, so now _BaseShadowserverParser provides support for additional_standard_items (which is a parser class's attribute similar to constant_items). For relevant parser classes, the name and category items have been moved from their constant_items to their additional_standard_items.

• [data sources] Now the generic *.misp collector supports loading state also in its legacy Python-2-specific format.

• [data sources, data pipeline, lib] A new restriction (implemented in n6lib.data_spec.fields, concerning the IPv4FieldForN6 and AddressFieldForN6 classes) is that, from now on, the zero IP address (0.0.0.0) is neither a valid component IP within a record dict's address (i.e., its items' ip) or enriched (i.e., keys in the mapping being its second item), nor a valid value of a record dict's dip. Note that this restriction regards all parsers and most of the other data pipeline components (via the machinery of n6lib.record_dict.RecordDict et consortes...).

• [data pipeline] The name of the AMQP input queue declared by n6enrich has been changed (!) from enrichement to enrichment.

• [data pipeline] The n6enrich pipeline component (implemented in n6datapipeline.enrich): from now on, the zero IP address (0.0.0.0), irrespective of its exact formatting (i.e., regardless whether some octets are formatted with redundant leading zeros), is no longer taken into account when IPs are extracted from urls, and when fqdns are resolved to IPs.

• [data pipeline, event db, config] From now on, when n6recorder, during its activity (i.e., within Recorder.input_callback()...), encounters an exception which represents a database/DB API error (i.e., an instance of a MySQLdb.MySQLError subclass, possibly wrapped in (an) SQLAlchemy-specific exception(s)...) whose error code (i.e., <exception>.args[0] being an int, if any) indicates a fatal condition -- then a SystemExit(<appropriate message>) is raised, so that the AMQP input message is requeued and the n6recorder executable script exits with a non-zero status. The set of error codes which are considered fatal (i.e. which trigger this behavior) is configurable -- by setting the fatal_db_api_error_codes configuration option in the recorder section; by default, that set includes only one value: 1021 (i.e., the ERR_DISK_FULL code -- see the error codes listing on the MariaDB website).

• [portal, rest api, stream api, data pipeline, lib] A security-related behavioral fix has been applied to the event access rights and event ownership machinery (implemented in n6lib.auth_api...): from now on, IP-network-based access or ownership criteria (those stored in the criteria_ip_network and inside_filter_ip_network Auth DB tables) referring to networks that contain the zero IP address (0.0.0.0) are translated to IP address ranges whose lower bound is 0.0.0.1 (in other words, 0.0.0.0 is excluded). Thanks to that, events without ip are no longer erroneously considered as matching such IP-network-based criteria. In practice, from the security point of view, the fix is most important when it comes to Portal and REST API (considering that those components query the Event DB, in records of which the absence of an IP is, for certain technical reasons, represented by the value 0 rather than NULL). For other involved components, i.e., n6filter and n6anonymizer/Stream API, the security risk was rather small or non-existent. Note: as the fix is also related to n6filter, it affects values of min_ip in the inside_criteria part of the JSON returned by the Portal API's endpoint /info/config; they are displayed by the Portal's GUI: in the Account information page, in the "Inside" resource events criteria section, below the IP network filter label -- as IP ranges' lower bounds.

• [portal, rest api, lib] A behavioral fix related to the one described above (yet, this time, not related to security) has been applied to the procedure of translation of the ip.net request parameter to the corresponding fragment of Event DB queries (see: the ip_net_query() method of n6lib.db_events.n6NormalizedData...): from now on, each value that refers to a network which contains the zero IP address (0.0.0.0) is translated to an IP address range whose lower bound is 0.0.0.1 (in other words, 0.0.0.0 is excluded); thanks to that, events with no ip are no longer erroneously included in such cases.

• [portal, rest api, lib] A new restriction (implemented in n6lib.data_spec.fields, concerning the IPv4FieldForN6 and AddressFieldForN6 classes) is that the zero IP address (0.0.0.0) is no longer a valid value of the ip and dip request parameters received by REST API's endpoints and analogous Portal API's endpoints. Also, regarding the Portal's GUI, the front-end validation part related to the IP search parameter has been appropriately adjusted.

• [portal, rest api, lib] The mechanism of result data cleaning (implemented as a part of a certain non-public stuff invoked in n6lib.data_spec.N6DataSpec.clean_result_dict()) has been enhanced in such a way that the address field of cleaned result dicts no longer includes any items with ip equal to the zero IP address (0.0.0.0), i.e., they are filtered out even if they appear in some Event DB records (they could when it comes to legacy data). Note that it is complemented by the already existing mechanism of removing from raw result dicts any ip and dip fields whose values are equal to the zero IP address (see: n6lib.db_events.make_raw_result_dict()...).

• [rest api, config, lib] n6lib.generate_test_events: several changes and enhancements regarding the RandomEvent class have been made, including backward incompatible additions/removals/modifications of options defined by its config spec, affecting the way the optional test REST API application (provided by n6web.main_test_api et consortes...) is configured using generator_rest_api.* options... Also, most of the RandomEvent's configuration-related stuff has been factored out to a new mixin class, RandomEventGeneratorConfigMixin.

System/Configuration/Programming-Only

• [data sources, data pipeline, config, etc/docker] Added, fixed, changed and removed several config prototype (*.conf) files in the directories: N6DataSources/n6datasources/data/conf/, N6DataPipeline/n6datapipeline/data/conf/ and etc/n6/. Note: for some of them, manual adjustments in user's actual configuration files are required (see the relevant comments in those files...).

• [setup, lib] N6Lib's dependencies: changed the version of dnspython from 1.16 to 2.4. Also, added a new dependency, importlib_resources, with version locked as >=5.12, <5.13.

• [setup, data pipeline] N6DataPipeline's dependencies: temporarily locked the version of intelmq as <3.2.

Programming-Only

• [data pipeline] n6datapipeline.enrich.Enricher: renamed the url_to_fqdn_or_ip() method to url_to_hostname(), and changed its interface regarding the return value: now it is always either a non-empty str or None.

• [lib] n6lib.common_helpers and n6sdk.encoding_helpers: renamed the try_to_normalize_surrogate_pairs_to_proper_codepoints() function to replace_surrogate_pairs_with_proper_codepoints().

• [lib] Removed three functions from n6lib.common_helpers: is_ipv4(), is_pure_ascii() and lower_if_pure_ascii().

• [lib] n6lib.db_events: removed IPAddress's constant attributes NONE and NONE_STR (instead of them use the n6lib.const's constants LACK_OF_IPv4_PLACEHOLDER_AS_INT and LACK_OF_IPv4_PLACEHOLDER_AS_STR).

• [lib] n6lib.record_dict: removed RecordDict's constant attribute setitem_key_to_target_key (together with some internal experimental mechanism based on it...).

• [lib] n6lib.url_helpers: changed normalize_url()'s signature and behavior...

• [tests] n6datasources.tests.parsers._parser_test_mixin.ParserTestMixin (and all inheriting parser test classes): added checking that if the parser's default_binding_key includes the raw format version tag segment then that segment matches the test class's attribute PARSER_RAW_FORMAT_VERSION_TAG.

Less Notable Changes and Fixes

• [data sources] Added missing re.ASCII flag to regex definitions in a few parsers: sblam.spam, spamhaus.drop and spamhaus.edrop (the lack of that flag caused that the affected regexes were too broad...).

• [data sources, config] Restored, in the ShadowserverMailCollector section of the N6DataSources/n6datasources/data/conf/60_shadowserver.conf config prototype file, the (mistakenly deleted) "Poland Netcore/Netis Router Vulnerability Scan":"netis" item of the subject_to_channel mapping.

• [data pipeline] n6enrich: fixed a few bugs concerning extraction of the hostname being a domain name (to become fqdn) or an IP address (to become ip in address...) from url. Those bugs caused that, for certain (rather uncommon) cases of malformed or untypical URLs, whole events were rejected (because of an exception), or (only for some cases and only if the Python's assertion-removal optimization mode was in effect) the resultant event's enriched field erroneously included the "fqdn" marker whereas fqdn was not successfully extracted from url.

• [data pipeline] Fixed n6anonymizer: now output bodies produced by the _get_result_dicts_and_output_body() method of n6datapipeline.aux.anonymizer.Anonymizer are of the proper type (bytes)...

• [admin panel] Fixed a RIPE search-related bug in the Admin Panel (in N6AdminPanel/n6adminpanel/static/lookup_api_handler.js -- in the RipePopupBase._getListsOfSeparatePersonOrOrgData() function where the initial empty list was inadvertently added to the resultList, leading to duplicate data entries in certain cases; this update ensures that a new currentList is only added to resultList upon encountering a valid separator and if it contains any data, preventing the addition of an empty initial list and the duplication of the first data set).

• [admin panel, lib] Extended the scope of data obtained from RIPE and displayed in the Admin Panel -- thanks to adding an org-key-based search feature to the n6lib.ripe_api_client.RIPEApiClient, which enables it to perform additional searches when encountering the org key; the enhancement allows for the retrieval and integration of organization-specific results into the existing data set (broadening the overall search capabilities).

• [etc/docker] Replaced expired test/example certificates.

• [data sources, data pipeline, portal, setup, config, cli, lib, tests, etc/docker, docs] Various additions, fixes, changes, enhancements as well as some cleanups and code modernization/refactoring.

Programming-Only

• [lib] n6lib.common_helpers: from now on, the ip_network_tuple_to_min_max_ip() function (also available via n6sdk.encoding_helpers) accepts an optional flag argument, force_min_ip_greater_than_zero.

• [lib] n6lib.common_helpers: added the as_str_with_minimum_esc() function (also available via n6sdk.encoding_helpers).

• [lib] n6lib.const: added the LACK_OF_IPv4_PLACEHOLDER_AS_INT (equal to 0) and LACK_OF_IPv4_PLACEHOLDER_AS_STR (equal to "0.0.0.0") constants.

• [lib, tests] n6lib.unit_test_helpers: added to TestCaseMixin a new helper method, raise_exc().

• [lib] Various additions, changes and removals regarding experimental code.

4.0.1 (2023-06-03)

• [docs, setup] Fixed generation of the docs by upgrading mkdocs to the version 1.2.4.

4.0.0 (2023-06-03)

This release is a big milestone.

Among others:

• the n6 Portal gained support for OpenID Connect-based single sign-on (SSO) authentication;

• the n6 Stream API (STOMP-based) now supports authentication based on API keys (those which have already been accepted by the n6 REST API); the new mechanism, implemented as a part of the N6BrokerAuthApi package, replaces the previously used mechanism (which was based on X.509 client certificates);

• added a significant number of components obtaining and processing security event data from external sources: 26 collectors and 86 parsers; now, in total, we have 35 collectors and 91 parsers (see the N6DataSources package);

• got rid of the Python-2-compatible legacy code (most of which were Python 2 versions of collectors and parsers) that used to reside in N6Core; the accompanying Python 2 packages (N6CoreLib, N6Lib-py2 and N6SDK-py2) have also been removed; note that the components related to active data sources have been migrated to Python 3 (8 collectors and 7 parsers -- now they reside in N6DataSources); therefore, n6 is now Python-3-only (finally!);

• significant performance improvements have been accomplished: certain kinds of data queries (via the n6 REST API or n6 Portal) have become much faster, and n6aggregator's memory consumption has been considerably reduced;

• also, many minor improvements, a bunch of fixes, some refactoring and various cleanups have been made.

Note that some of the changes are not backwards compatible.

Further updates of 3.0 series...

[...]

3.0.1 (2021-12-03)

• [docs] A bunch of fixes and improvements regarding the documentation, including major changes to its structure, layout and styling.

• [setup] do_setup.py: regarding the default value of the option --additional-packages under Python 3, the version of the mkdocs package has been pinned (1.2.3), and the mkdocs-material package (providing the material docs theme) has been added (and its version is also pinned: 8.0.3); regarding the same under Python 2, the mkdocs package has been removed.

3.0.0 (2021-12-01)

This release is a big milestone. It includes, among others:

• migration to Python 3

• in the n6 data pipeline infrastructure: optional integration with IntelMQ

• in the n6 Portal: a new frontend (implemented using React), two-factor authentication (based on TOTP), user's/organization's own data management (including config update and password reset forms, with related e-mail notices), and other goodies...

• in the n6 REST API: API-key-based authentication

• and many, many more improvements, a bunch of fixes, as well as some refactoring, removals and cleanups...

Note that many of the changes are not backwards compatible.

Also, note that most of the main elements of n6 -- namely: N6DataPipeline, N6DataSources, N6Portal, N6RestApi, N6AdminPanel, N6BrokerAuthApi, N6Lib and N6SDK -- are now Python-3-only (more precisely: are compatible with CPython 3.9).

Updates of 2.0 series...

[...]

2.0.0 (2018-06-22)

The first public release of n6.