fleet/docs/infrastructure/adding-hosts-to-kolide.md

Adding Hosts To Kolide

To use Kolide, you must install the open source osquery tool on the hosts which you wish to monitor. You can find various ways to install osquery on a variety of platforms at https://osquery.io/downloads.

Once you have installed osquery, you need to do two things:

Set an environment variable with an agent enrollment secret

The enrollment secret is a value that osquery uses to ensure a level of confidence that the host running osquery is actually a host that you would like to hear from. There are a few ways you can set the enrollment secret on the hosts which you control. You can either set the value as:

• an value of an environment variable (a common name is OSQUERY_ENROLL_SECRET)
• the content of a local file (a common path is /etc/osquery/enrollment_secret)

The value of the environment variable or content of the file should be a secret shared between the osqueryd client and the Kolide server. This is basically osqueryd's passphrase which it uses to authenticate with Kolide, convincing Kolide that it is actually one of your hosts. The passphrase could be whatever you'd like, but it would be prudent to have the passphrase long, complex, mixed-case, etc. When you launch the Kolide server, you should specify this same value.

If you use an environment variable for this, you can specify it with the --enroll_secret_env flag when you launch osqueryd. If you use a local file for this, you can specify it's path with the --enroll_secret_path flag.

If your organization has a robust internal public key infrastructure (PKI) and you already deploy TLS client certificates to each host to uniquely identify them, then osquery supports an advanced authentication mechanism which takes advantage of this. Please contact help@kolide.co for assistance with this option.

Deploy the TLS certificate that osquery will use to communicate with Kolide

To ensure that it is especially difficult to compromise the TLS communication that occurs between the osqueryd agent and the Kolide server, osqueryd requires you to explicitly define the root certificate authority of the Kolide server (PEM-encoded) in the content of a local file. If you are running osqueryd behind a load-balancer which does TLS termination, then you will have to talk to your system administrator about where to find this certificate. If your browser is directly connected to the same web server which your osqueryd clients will be, you can download the certificate here.

You can specify the path to this certificate with the --tls_server_certs flag when you launch osqueryd.

Launching osqueryd

Assuming that you are deploying your enrollment secret as the environment variable OSQUERY_ENROLL_SECRET and your osquery server certificate is at /etc/osquery/kolide.crt, you could copy and paste the following command with the following flags (be sure to replace acme.kolide.co with the hostname for your Kolide installation):

osqueryd
 --enroll_secret_env=OSQUERY_ENROLL_SECRET
 --tls_server_certs=/etc/osquery/kolide.crt
 --tls_hostname=acme.kolide.co
 --host_identifier=hostname
 --enroll_tls_endpoint=/api/v1/osquery/enroll
 --config_plugin=tls
 --config_tls_endpoint=/api/v1/osquery/config
 --config_tls_refresh=10
 --disable_distributed=false
 --distributed_plugin=tls
 --distributed_interval=10
 --distributed_tls_max_attempts=3
 --distributed_tls_read_endpoint=/api/v1/osquery/distributed/read
 --distributed_tls_write_endpoint=/api/v1/osquery/distributed/write
 --logger_plugin=tls
 --logger_tls_endpoint=/api/v1/osquery/log
 --logger_tls_period=10

If your osquery server certificate is deployed to a path that is not /etc/osquery/kolide.crt, then be sure to update the --tls_server_certs flag. Similarly, if your enrollment secret is in an environment variable that is not called OSQUERY_ENROLL_SECRET, then be sure to update the --enroll_secret_env environment variable. If your enroll secret is defined in a local file, specify the file's path with the --enroll_secret_path flag instead of using the --enroll_secret_env flag.

Using a flag file to manage flags

For your convenience, osqueryd supports putting all of your flags into a single file. We suggest deploying this file to /etc/osquery/kolide.flags. If you've deployed the appropriate osquery flags to that path, you could simply launch osquery via:

osqueryd --flagfile=/etc/osquery/kolide.flags

Enrolling multiple macOS hosts

If you're managing an enterprise environment with multiple Mac devices, you likely have an enterprise deployment tool like Munki or Jamf Pro to deliver software to your mac fleet. You can deploy osqueryd and enroll all your macs into Kolide using your software management tool of choice.

First, download and import the osquery package into your software management repository. You can also use the community supported autopkg recipe to keep osqueryd updated.

Next, you will have to create an enrollment package to get osqueryd running and talking to Kolide. Specifically, you'll have to create a custom package because you have to provide specific information about your Kolide deployment. To make this as easy as possible, we've created a Makefile to help you build a macOS enrollment package.

First, download the Kolide repository from GitHub and navigate to the tools/mac directory of the repository.

Next, you'll have to edit the config.mk file. You'll find all of the necessary information by clicking "Add New Host" in your kolide server.

• Set the KOLIDE_HOSTNAME variable to the FQDN of your Kolide server.
• Set the ENROLL_SECRET variable to the enroll secret you got from Kolide.
• Paste the contents of the Kolide TLS certificate after the following line:

  define KOLIDE_TLS_CERTIFICATE
  

Note that osqueryd requires a full certificate chain, even for certificates which might be trusted by your keychain. The "Fetch Kolide Certificate" button in the Add New Host screen will attempt to fetch the full chain for you.

Once you've configured the config.mk file with the correct variables, you can run make in the tools/mac directory. Running make will create a new kolide-enroll.pkg file which you can import into your software repository and deploy to your mac fleet.

The enrollment package must installed after the osqueryd package, and will install a LaunchDaemon to keep the osqueryd process running.