Works Beats are important building blocks of PredictiveWorks' combined Cyber Defense and IoT solution approach, called Cy(I)IoT.
Beats are essentially lightweight, purpose-built scalable micro-services based on Akka. They are built to acquire, transform and disseminate data. Works Beats are data gateways that connect various data sources with FIWARE, MQTT and SSE output channel.
There are current 7 official Beats: Fiware Beat, Fleet Beat, OPC-UA Beat, OpenCTI Beat, Things Beat, TLS Beat and Zeek Beat.
Fiware Beat is an Akka-based Http(s) microservice that connects to a FIWARE Context Broker, receives notifications that match configured subscriptions, and re-publishes these notifications via MQTT or SSE.
This approach sends higher level context (e.g., interpreted data) back to MQTT networks to enrich and complement sensor readings.
FIWARE brings a curated framework of open source software components to accelerate and ease the implementation of smart IoT platforms and solutions.
The main components comprise an information hub, the FIWARE Context Broker, and a set of IoT Agents (IOTA) to interact with devices via widely used IoT protocols and bridge between multiple message formats and a common NGSI v2 and NGSI-LD based format.
From an analytics perspective, connecting to a (single) Context Broker and receiving device notification in real-time and in NGSI format, is a lot easier than interacting with plenty of individual data sources.
Just to name a few IoT protocols supported by the FIWARE framework:
- ISOXML
- LoRaWAN
- LWM2M over CoaP
- MQTT
- OPC-UA
- Sigfox
FIWARE is not restricted to these protocols, and also provides an agent library to build custom IoT Agents.
Fiware Beat perfectly works with Works Stream, an Apache Spark Streaming based library, and events from multi-protocol IoT devices can be used in the Apache Spark ecosystem.
Fleet Beat is an Akka-based Http(s) microservice that monitors the Fleet platform's event log directory and re-publishes log (change) events via FIWARE, MQTT or SSE.
Fleet is a device management platform on top of Osquery for 100,000+ devices (and Osquery agents). Fleet is a TLS endpoint for Osquery agents and collects configured & adhoc query results on the file system.
From an analytics perspective, Fleet serves as a query result aggregator that can be used to derive meaningful insights from a large ensemble of devices at once.
Fleet Beat is a data gateway that tracks, standardizes and publishes operating system data (endpoint data) to IoT data platforms. Suppose you built an IoT network to monitor and analyze operational data. FleetBeat seamlessly complements every IoT infrastructure with security data from endpoint sensors.
Fleet Beat is part of PredictiveWorks' Security Beats and offers a threat detection sensor for enterprise endpoints or nodes. Due to its output channels, FIWARE, MQTT and SSE, Fleet Beat is built to complement (security) context recognition infrastructures with raw context.
Fleet Beat perfectly works with Works Stream.
OPC-UA Beat is an Akka-based Http(s) microservice that connects to an OPC-UA server leveraging Eclipse Milo, listens to configured subscriptions and re-publishes subscription results via FIWARE, MQTT or SSE.
Milo is an open-source implementation of OPC UA (currently targeting 1.03). It includes a high-performance stack (channels, serialization, data structures, security), and client and server SDKs.
OPC-UA Beat perfectly works with Works Stream.
OpenCTI Beat is an Akka-based Http(s) microservice that connects to the OpenCTI SSE stream, transforms create, update and delete events from STIX 2.0 to NGSI and re-publishes these events via FIWARE, MQTT and SSE.
OpenCTI is a unified open source platform for all levels of Cyber Threat Intelligence. A major goal is to build and provide a powerful knowledge base for cyber threat intelligence and cyber operations.
OpenCTI ships with a variety of connectors to widely known threat intelligence data sources like AlienVault, CrowdStrike, FireEye and MISP, MITRE ATT&CK and more.
OpenCTI Beat perfectly works with Works Stream, an Apache Spark Streaming based library, and open threat intelligence events can be used in the Apache Spark ecosystem.
Osquery Beat is an Akka-based Http(s) microservice and provides a TLS endpoint for Osquery node-based query results and status messages. Node and status information is consumed and re-published via MQTT or SSE.
This service can also be used to configure and manage a fleet of Osquery nodes. To this end, Osquery Beat is backed by Redis.
Osquery is an operating system instrumentation framework that exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows to write SQL queries to explore operating system data.
Osquery is a perfect tool for Host Intrusion Detection once it is configured as it has the power to monitor thousands of machines simultaneously. Adding analytics and alerts on top of osquery logs will help in the easy setup of in-house EDR Solution.
Osquery Beat perfectly works with Works Stream, an Apache Spark Streaming based library, and events from thousands of machines and endpoints can be used in the Apache Spark ecosystem.
Things Beat is an Akka-based Http(s) microservice that leverages a MQTT based ThingsBoard connector. Retrieved events are transformed into the NGSI format and re-published via MQTT or SSE.
ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform for data collection, processing, visualization, and device management. It enables device connectivity via industry standard IoT protocols like MQTT, CoAP and HTTP and supports both cloud and on-premises deployments.
Things Beat perfectly works with Works Stream, an Apache Spark Streaming based library, and events from multi-protocol IoT devices can be used in the Apache Spark ecosystem:
- BACnet
- BLE
- CAN
- CoAP
- HTTP(S)
- OPC-UA
- Modbus
- MQTT
Zeek Beat is an Akka-based Http(s) microservice that monitors the Zeek sensor's event log directory and re-publishes log (change) events via MQTT or SSE.
Zeek is a passive, open-source network traffic analyzer. It can be used as a network security monitor (NSM) to support investigations of suspicious or malicious activity.
Zeek offers an extensive set of logs describing network activity, even beyond the security domain, including performance measurement and troubleshooting.
These logs range from comprehensive records of every connection seen on the wire, to HTTP sessions with their requested URIs, key headers, MIME types, and server responses, DNS requests with replies, SSL certificates, SMTP sessions and much more.