Zabbix plays a crucial role in monitoring all kinds of “things” – IoT devices, domains, cloud infrastructures and more. It can also be integrated with third-party solutions – for example, with Oxidized for configuration backup monitoring. Given the nature of Zabbix, it usually contains a lot of confidential information as well as (more importantly) some kind of elevated access to network elements while being used by operators, engineers, and customers. This requires that Zabbix as a product should be as secure as possible.
Zabbix has upped their security game and is actively working with HackerOne to take full advantage of the reach of their global community by providing a bug bounty program. And though it doesn’t happen too often, from time to time a security issue arises in Zabbix or one of its dependencies, warranting the release of a Security Advisory.
Table of Contents
The issue
Zabbix typically releases a Security Advisory and might even assign a CVE to the issue. Cool, that is what we expect from reputable software developers. They even inform their customers with support contracts before publishing the advisory to allow them to patch installations beforehand.
If you don’t have a support contract, you can find out about these security advisories on your own by monitoring the Security Advisory page or the published CVEs for Zabbix. NIST has a public API that can be used and that works well, but CVEs are often incomplete.
Zabbix currently publishes no API for their Security Advisories – there is the public tracker which contains all entries and can be queried via API, but it’s only available as unstructured text.
The solution
We want to automatically be notified of new security advisories, and the only data source that contains all data in a structured way is the Zabbix Security Advisory page. However, structured doesn’t mean easily parseable – in fact, it is just raw HTML. We could try to solve this issue in Zabbix, but the easier solution in this case is to scrape the page and generate a JSON file which then can be parsed by Zabbix to achieve our goal, which is automated notifications of new advisories.
Webscraping
We’ve chosen to scrape the Zabbix site using Rust, utilizing the Scraper crate to parse the HTML and flesh out the relevant parts we want. Without going into too much detail, the interesting information is stored in 2 tables, one with the table-simple class applied and one with the table-vertical class applied. Using CSS selectors (which is what the Scraper crate requires), we can retrieve the information we want.
This information is then stored in a struct, which gets added to a hashmap. The result is stored in a vector, which is added to a struct, which eventually is used to generate the JSON we require. Phew.
The resulting JSON is easily parseable by Zabbix:
{
"last_updated": {
"secs": ,
"nanos": ,
},
"reports": [
_list of reports_
]
}
The ‘reports’ array contains one entry per advisory, and each entry has the following layout. Unsurprisingly, this closely matches the information that is available on the Zabbix Security Advisory page:
{
"_zbxref_": {
"zbxref": "_zbxref_",
"cveref": "CVE-XXXX-XXXX",
"score": X.X,
"synopsis": "_synopsis_",
"description": "_description_",
"vectors": "_vectors_",
"resolution": "_resolution_",
"workaround": "_workaround_",
"acknowledgement": "_acknowledgement_",
"components": [
_list of components_,
_list of components_
],
"affected_version": [
{
"affected": "_version_",
"fixed": "_version_"
}
]
}
}
Now, we could provide you with the code of the scraping tool and wish you good luck with making sure the tool runs every X hours and somehow, somewhere stores the resulting JSON for Zabbix to parse. That would be the easy way out, right?
Instead, we’ve chosen to host the Rust program as an AWS Lambda function, triggered every 2 hours by the AWS EventBridge Scheduler and with some code added to the Rust program (function?) to upload the resulting JSON to an AWS S3 bucket. This chain of AWS products not only makes sure that our cloud bill increases, but also guarantees we don’t have to host (and maintain!) anything ourselves.
The result? Just one HTTP GET away…
Template
TL;DR: Download the template here.
Now that the data is available in JSON, it’s fairly easy to parse it using Zabbix. Using the HTTP Agent data collection, we download the JSON from AWS. The URI is stored in the {$ZBX_ADVISORY_URI} macro, which allows for easy modification. By default, it points to the JSON file hosted on AWS S3. This retrieval is done by the Retrieve the Zabbix Security Advisories item, which acts as the source for every other operation. It retrieves the JSON every hour, and with the JSON being generated every 2 hours, the maximum delay between Zabbix publishing a new advisory and you getting it into Zabbix is 3 hours.
The retrieve the Zabbix Security Advisories item acts as a master item for the Last Updated item. This item uses a JSONPath preprocessing step to flesh out the information we want: $.last_updated.secs. The resulting data is stored as unixtime so that we mere mortals can easily read when the last update of the JSON file was performed.
A trigger is configured for this item to ensure that the JSON file isn’t too old. The trigger JSON Feed is out of date has the following expression:
last(/Zabbix Security Advisories/zbx_sec.last_updated)>{$ZBX_ADVISORY_UPDATE_INTERVAL}*{$ZBX_ADVISORY_UPDATE_THRESHOLD}
By default, {$ZBX_ADVISORY_UPDATE_INTERVAL} is set to 2 hours (which is the interval the file gets updated by our tool) and {$ZBX_ADVISORY_UPDATE_THRESHOLD} is set to 3. So, when the JSON file hasn’t been updated within the last 6 hours, this trigger will trigger.
The item Number of advisories uses the same principle, where a JSONPath preprocessing step is used to flesh out the information we want: $.reports. However, as $.reports is an array, we can use functions on it. In this case .length(), which returns an integer. This number is used in the associated trigger A new Zabbix Security Advisory has been published, which simply triggers when the value changes.
This is all very cool, but the JSON has a lot more information, including details about each report. In order to get these details into Zabbix, we use a discovery rule to ‘loop’ through the JSON and create items based on what we’ve discovered: Discover Advisories. This rule uses (again) a JSONPath preprocessing step to get the details we want: $.reports[*][*]. Based on the resulting data (which is a single report in this case), 2 LLD Macros are assigned: {#ZBXREF} – based on the JSONpath $.zbxref and {{#CVEREF} – based on the JSONpath $.cveref.
For each discovered report, 8 items are created. They all work using the same principle, so I will only describe one: Advisory {#ZBXREF} / {#CVEREF} – Acknowledgement. This item uses the master item Zabbix Security Advisories, just like all other items described so far. JSONPath is once again used to get the information we want. The expression $.reports[*][“{#ZBXREF}”].acknowledgement.first() provides exactly what we need, where we combine a LLD macro ({#ZBXREF}) and a JSONpath function (.first()) to first ‘select’ the correct advisory in the JSON and then retrieve the value.
All other 7 items work like this, and there is only one exception: Advisory {#ZBXREF} / {#CVEREF} – Components. The ‘components’ value in the JSON file is actually an array with 1 or more items, describing which components might be affected. But we cannot store arrays in Zabbix, so we use another preprocessing step to convert the array into a string. A few lines of Javascript is all we need:
components = JSON.parse(value); return components.toString();
First, we parse the JSON input (‘value’) into an array, only to apply the javascript .toString() function on it. The toString method of arrays calls join() internally, which joins the array and returns one string containing each array element separated by commas, which is exactly what we want: a string, separated by commas.
To make working with these advisories easier, each item has the component tag applied, with the value zabbix_security. If the item belongs to an advisory, the advisory tag is added with the value of {#ZBXREF} (which is the advisory number/name). That way, we can easily filter on all Zabbix Security items, filter on all items for a single advisory, and (to make things even better) the type tag is also applied, with the actual type being ‘workaround’ or ‘description.’ This allows for filtering on all Zabbix Security items, of the type ‘score’ (et cetera) to easily gain insight into the different advisories and their score, synopsis, description, components, et cetera.
Dashboard
The tags on the items allow for filtering, but with Zabbix 7.0 we can use all great new nifty features, such as the Item Navigator widget combined with the Item Value widget. Let’s take a look at what configuring such a dashboard might look like if you set up the Item Navigator widget as follows:
And then ‘link’ the Item Value widget to it:
You should get a somewhat decent dashboard. It isn’t perfect (given that the Item Value widget only seems to be able to display a single line of text) but it’s something.
Disclaimer
Though we use this functionality ourselves, this all comes without any guarantee. The technology used to retrieve data (screen scraping) is mediocre at best and could break at any moment if and when Zabbix changes the layout of their page.
NOTE: Because of recent changes to the Zabbix vulnerabilities page, some information presented in this article may no longer apply. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.
