Machinae is a tool for collecting intelligence from public sites/feeds about various security-related pieces of data: IP addresses, domain names, URLs, email addresses, file hashes and SSL fingerprints. It was inspired by Automater, another excellent tool for collecting information.

The Machinae project was born from wishing to improve Automater in 4 areas:

1. Codebase – Bring Automater to python3 compatibility while making the code more pythonic
2. Configuration – Use a more human readable configuration format (YAML)
3. Inputs – Support JSON parsing out-of-the-box without the need to write regular expressions, but still support regex scraping when needed
4. Outputs – Support additional output types, including JSON, while making extraneous output optional

Installation

Machinae can be installed using pip3:

pip3 install machinae

Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, can be installed directly from github:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/HurricaneLabs/machinae.git

You will need to have whatever dependencies are required on your system for compiling Python modules (on Debian based systems, python3-dev), as well as the libyaml development package (on Debian based systems, libyaml-dev).

You’ll also want to grab the latest configuration file and place it in /etc/machinae.yml.

Configuration File

Machinae supports a simple configuration merging system to allow you to make adjustments to the configuration without modifying the machinae.yml we provide you, making configuration updates a snap. This is done by finding a system-wide default configuration (default /etc/machinae.yml), merging into that a system-wide local configuration (/etc/machinae.local.yml) and finally a per-user local configuration (~/.machinae.yml). The system-wide configuration can also be located in the current working directory, can be set using the MACHINAE_CONFIG environment variable, or of course by using the -c or --config command line options. Configuration merging can be disabled by passing the --nomerge option, which will cause Machinae to only load the default system-wide configuration (or the one passed on the command line).

As an example of this, say you’d like to enable the Fortinet Category site, which is disabled by default. You could modify /etc/machinae.yml, but these changes would be overwritten by an update. Instead, you can put the following in either /etc/machinae.local.yml or ~/.machinae.yml:

fortinet_classify:
  default: true

Or, conversely, to disable a site, such as Virus Total pDNS:

vt_ip:
  default: false
vt_domain:
  default: false

Usage

Machinae usage is very similar to Automater:

usage: machinae [-h] [-c CONFIG] [--nomerge] [-d DELAY] [-f FILE] [-i INFILE] [-v]
            [-o {D,J,N,S}] [-O {ipv4,ipv6,fqdn,email,sslfp,hash,url}] [-q]
            [-s SITES] [-a AUTH] [-H HTTP_PROXY]
            [--dump-config | --detect-otype]
            ...

• See above for details on the -c/--config and --nomerge options.
• Machinae supports a -d/--delay option, like Automater. However, Machinae uses 0 by default.
• Machinae output is controlled by two arguments:
  • -o controls the output format, and can be followed by a single character to indicated the desired type of output:
    • N is the default output (“Normal”)
    • D is the default output, but dot characters are replaced
    • J is JSON output
  • -f/--file specifies the file where output should be written. The default is “-” for stdout.
• Machinae will attempt to auto-detect the type of target passed in (Machinae refers to targets as “observables” and the type as “otype”). This detection can be overridden with the -O/--otype option. The choices are listed in the usage
• By default, Machinae operates in verbose mode. In this mode, it will output status information about the services it is querying on the console as they are queried. This output will always be written to stdout, regardless of the output setting. To disable verbose mode, use -q
• By default, Machinae will run through all services in the configuration that apply to each target’s otype and are not marked as “default: false”. To modify this behavior, you can:
  • Pass a comma separated list of sites to run (use the top level key from the configuration).
  • Pass the special keyword all to run through all services including those marked as “default: false”

  Note that in both cases, otype validation is still applied.

• Machinae supports passing an HTTP proxy on the command line using the -H/--http-proxy argument. If no proxy is specified, machinae will search the standard HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables, as well as the less standard http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables.
• Lastly, a list of targets should be passed. All arguments other than the options listed above will be interpreted as targets.

Out-of-the-Box Data Sources

Machinae comes with out-of-the-box support for the following data sources:

• IPVoid
• URLVoid
• URL Unshortener (http://www.toolsvoid.com/unshorten-url)
• Malc0de
• SANS
• FreeGeoIP (freegeoip.io)
• Fortinet Category
• VirusTotal pDNS (via web scrape – commented out)
• VirusTotal pDNS (via JSON API)
• VirusTotal URL Report (via JSON API)
• VirusTotal File Report (via JSON API)
• Reputation Authority
• ThreatExpert
• VxVault
• ProjectHoneypot
• McAfee Threat Intelligence
• StopForumSpam
• Cymru MHR
• ICSI Certificate Notary
• TotalHash (disabled by default)
• DomainTools Parsed Whois (Requires API key)
• DomainTools Reverse Whois (Requires API key)
• DomainTools Reputation
• IP WHOIS (Using RIR REST interfaces)
• Hacked IP
• Metadefender Cloud (Requires API key)
• GreyNoise (Requires API key)
• IBM XForce (Required API key)

With additional data sources on the way.

HTTP Basic Authentication and Configuration

Machinae supports HTTP Basic Auth for sites that require it through the --auth/-a flag. You will need to create a YAML file with your credentials, which will include a key to the site that requires the credentials and a list of two items, username and password or API key. For example, for the included PassiveTotal site this might look like:

passivetotal: ['myemail@example.com', 'my_api_key']

Inside the site configuration under request you will see a key such as:

json:
  request:
    url: '...'
    auth: passivetotal

The auth: passivetotal points to the key inside the authentication config passed via the command line.

Disabled by default

The following sites are disabled by default

• Fortinet Category (fortinet_classify)
• Telize Geo IP (telize)
• TotalHash (totalhash_ip)
• DomainTools Parsed Whois (domaintools_parsed_whois)
• DomainTools Reverse Whois (domaintools_reverse_whois)
• DomainTools Reputation (domaintools_reputation)
• PassiveTotal Passive DNS (passivetotal_pdns)
• PassiveTotal Whois (passivetotal_whois)
• PassiveTotal SSL Certificate History (passivetotal_sslcert)
• PassiveTotal Host Attribute Components (passivetotal_components)
• PassiveTotal Host Attribute Trackers (passivetotal_trackers)
• MaxMind GeoIP2 Passive Insight (maxmind)
• FraudGuard (fraudguard)
• Shodan (shodan)
• Hacked IP
• Metadefender Cloud (Requires API key)
• GreyNoise (Requires API key)
• IBM XForce (Requires API key)

Output Formats

Machinae comes with a limited set of output formats: normal, normal with dot escaping, and JSON. We plan to add additional output formats in the future.

Adding additional sites

*** COMING SOON ***

Known Issues

• Some ISP’s on IPvoid contain double-encoded HTML entities, which are not double-decoded

Upcoming Features

• Add IDS rule search functionality (VRT/ET)
• Add “More info” link for sites
• Add “dedup” option to parser settings
• Add option for per-otype request settings
• Add custom per-site output for error codes