Machinery Modules

Machinery modules define how Cuckoo should interact with your virtualization software (or potentially even with physical disk imaging solutions). Since we decided to not enforce any particular vendor, from release 0.4 you are able to use your preferred solution and, in case it’s not supported by default, write a custom Python module that defines how to make Cuckoo use it.

Every machinery module should be located inside the cuckoo/cuckoo/machinery/ directory so that it will fall under the cuckoo.machinery module.

A basic machinery module would look like this:

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from cuckoo.common.abstracts import Machinery
from cuckoo.common.exceptions import CuckooMachineError

class MyMachinery(Machinery):
    def start(self, label):
        try:
            revert(label)
            start(label)
        except SomethingBadHappens:
            raise CuckooMachineError("oops!")

    def stop(self, label):
        try:
            stop(label)
        except SomethingBadHappens:
            raise CuckooMachineError("oops!")

The only requirements for Cuckoo are that:

  • The class inherits from Machinery.
  • You have a start() and stop() functions.
  • You raise CuckooMachineError when something fails.

As you understand, the machinery module is a core part of a Cuckoo setup, therefore make sure to spend enough time debugging your code and make it solid and resistant to any unexpected error.

Configuration

Every machinery module should come with a dedicated configuration file located in $CWD/conf/<machinery module name>.conf (which translates to cuckoo/data/conf/<machinery>conf in the Git repository). For example for cuckoo/cuckoo/machinery/kvm.py we have a $CWD/conf/kvm.conf.

The configuration file should follow the default structure:

[kvm]
# Specify a comma-separated list of available machines to be used. For each
# specified ID you have to define a dedicated section containing the details
# on the respective machine. (E.g. cuckoo1,cuckoo2,cuckoo3)
machines = cuckoo1

[cuckoo1]
# Specify the label name of the current machine as specified in your
# libvirt configuration.
label = cuckoo1

# Specify the operating system platform used by current machine
# [windows/darwin/linux].
platform = windows

# Specify the IP address of the current machine. Make sure that the IP address
# is valid and that the host machine is able to reach it. If not, the analysis
# will fail.
ip = 192.168.122.105

A main section called [<name of the module>] with a machines field containing a comma-separated list of machines IDs.

For each machine you should specify a label, a platform and its ip.

These fields are required by Cuckoo in order to use the already embedded initialize() function that generates the list of available machines.

If you plan to change the configuration structure you should override the initialize() function (inside your own module, no need to modify Cuckoo’s core code). You can find its original code in the Machinery abstract inside cuckoo/common/abstracts.py.

LibVirt

Starting with Cuckoo 0.5 developing new machinery modules based on LibVirt is easy. Inside cuckoo/common/abstracts.py you can find LibVirtMachinery that already provides all the functionality for a LibVirt module. Just inherit this base class and specify your connection string, as in the example below:

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from cuckoo.common.abstracts import LibVirtMachinery

class MyMachinery(LibVirtMachinery):
    # Set connection string.
    dsn = "my:///connection"

This works for all the virtualization technologies supported by LibVirt. Just remember to check if your LibVirt package (if you are using one, for example from your Linux distribution) is compiled with the support for the technology you need.

You can check it with the following command:

$ virsh -V
Virsh command line tool of libvirt 0.9.13
See web site at http://libvirt.org/

Compiled with support for:
 Hypervisors: QEmu/KVM LXC UML Xen OpenVZ VMWare Test
 Networking: Remote Daemon Network Bridging Interface Nwfilter VirtualPort
 Storage: Dir Disk Filesystem SCSI Multipath iSCSI LVM
 Miscellaneous: Nodedev AppArmor Secrets Debug Readline Modular

If you don’t find your virtualization technology in the list of Hypervisors, you will need to recompile LibVirt with the specific support for the missing one.