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[RFC] E-Mail #999
[RFC] E-Mail #999
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Another item that came to mind, and I think makes sense to capture for further discussion later:
Would
email
be worth considering as an additional allowed value forevent.category
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I would say +1 on this.
@ebeahan if we would create this new
event.category
we should also update whichevent.type
we can combine with it and maybe see if we need new ones?There was a problem hiding this comment.
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Let's mention this in the RFC "Fields" section.
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The
.attachments.*
fields should follow thefile.*
fields. We can state this approach in the description for now.We can see later about the implementation, whether it's full reuse, or explicitly defining the fields that make sense for attachments.
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What do we for see as values for this?, and from which address fields (to, cc, bcc) would it be categorized on?
It seems to me like something that could potentially be difficult to implement, and not sure of the value for visualizations (but I could easily be missing something obvious, its been one of those days...)
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Good question, @dainperkins.
I assume the allowed values in there should be "inbound" and "outbound". Perhaps also "unknown" in the case of relays? Actually just like
network.direction
, "internal" is another class of emails that has a different threat profile. I wonder if there's a need for the value "external" (as in, I'm just an exchange, relaying between Yahoo and Gmail)?I agree populating this consistently may not be obvious in all scenarios.
I don't think as a third party, our solutions can determine between "inbound", "outbound" and "internal" without specific configuration that says what are "my domains".
But once we know that, I assume the heuristic is pretty straightforward:
So I'm +1 on adding the field. I think it makes sense. And unless I'm missing something, I think the heuristics are reasonable; and actually, perhaps some of the email-related event sources already provide such values? It's certainly useful for a spam filter to know which emails to filter. Not sure if it shows up in their logs though.
Action item for the RFC, though: let's start listing expected values for this field. I'm providing ideas above as a strawperson, based on what we have in
network.direction
. But if email data sources have other values for this, let's bring them to the table as well.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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If I remember correctly, address will contain the full
Person Name <person@example.com>
.We're defining the domain breakdown fields here because the sender is potentially a threat, and this is where we'll be looking for known bad domains/TLDs and so on.
But looking at the fields, I wonder if we should do the same with
email.reply_to.address
andemail.return_path.address
? They're also relevant to the sender.We can hold off on adding them for now, but I'm floating the idea to get feedback on whether there's a need for them.
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I think its worth exploring in the upcoming stage for sure if that is appropriate.
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Message IDs can be pretty creative. For example one of the message IDs for this PR's email notifications was
<elastic/ecs/pull/999/review/503143839@github.com>
.So I would make this one
wildcard
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nevertheless the message_id captures the uniqueness of a mail.
I can see that different mail servers have specific ways of building this Message ID and could be interesting (for identification purposes) capturing such behaviour (and spot the anomalies). With this said, a multi-field mapping would make sense here:
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What about renaming this to
return_path
-- it's a bit more descriptive of what I think you're actually going for here.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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I agree on this point as well, will update it in the next commit.
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This field really feels like it should be part of the related fields. Something like related.domains (though it currently doesn't exist, so it might be worth keeping here)
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Yeah this field is the outcome of a current discussion we have. Instead of having domain fields for bcc, cc, recipients etc, we decided currently to have them all as an array under one field. This might change in the upcoming stages. Thanks for the pointer, always happy to get feedback
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Yeah, my concern mainly with a related field is that you lose the directionality of the value. Which might be useful for some use-cases.
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We do have the
email.direction
though, would that be sufficient? We would calculate the direction before moving the different domains intoemail.domains
for example.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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When looking at the current fields provided, one of my concerns is it appears that they don't fit well with the rest of ECS. I think this can be partially fixed with the use of aliases, though, I don't believe aliases are standard/common in ECS.
Examples:
email.from -> source
email.to|cc|bcc -> destination
email.latency -> event.duration
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latency might be redundant depending on the specific action being recorded, but I wouldn't equate email.to|from with source and destination (or client/server) network entities
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Agreed, I think email has enough subtleties in both the "senders" (sender, reply_to, return_path) and the receivers (to, cc, bcc) that I don't think it makes sense to put them in
[source|destination].user.email
. Also, these aren't array fields anyway, so we couldn't capture everything from the get go.If an email server logs the
source.ip
from the MX that sent them an email though, that's totally appropriate to capture in that field.