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Web logs analysis

Webservers logs format

Webservers, such as Apache or nginx, usually follow known / standard log formats by default.

The following standard log formats are notably in use:

Name
Template
Example
Remarks

Common Log Format (CLF)

%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b <REMOTE_HOST> <- | IDENTITY> <USER> <TIMESTAMP> "<REQUEST>" <STATUS_CODE> <RETURN_SIZE>

127.0.0.1 - frank [10/Oct/2000:13:55:36 -0700] "GET /apache_pb.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 2326

A - indicates that the information is not present. The <IDENTITY> field is not reliable and will often not be logged. The <USER> field may not be indicated (-) even if the request was identified at a higher level. For instance, CMS, such as WordPress, may not rely on webserver authentication and can identify users at the application level. In such case, the webserver log, such as Apache, will not contain user information while the request was however dully authentified.

NCSA Combined Log Format

%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}" "%{User-agent}" <REMOTE_HOST> <- | IDENTITY> <USER> <TIMESTAMP> "<REQUEST>" <STATUS_CODE> <RETURN_SIZE> "<REFERER>" "<USER_AGENT>"

127.0.0.1 - frank [10/Oct/2022:13:55:36 -0700] "GET /apache_pb.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 2326 "http://www.example.com/start.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"

Identical to the Common Log Format (CLF) format, with the addition of the Referer and User-agent fields.

IIS Log File Format

W3C Extended Log File Format

Graphical web logs parsers / viewer

GoAccess

GoAccess is a C program that can be used to parse webserver logs to get a first level of statistics for the given logs: total requests, unique visitors, operating systems and browsers stats (if user-agent information is available), accessed endpoints, etc. GoAccess supports many web log formats (Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, etc.) and can outputs reports in JSON, CSV or HTML.

Statistics linked to specifics IPs require to first filter the log files.

# Generate a static HTLM report with statistics for the given input log file(s).
goaccess <ACCESS_LOG_FILE | ACCESS_LOG_FILES> -o <REPORT_CSV_FILE | REPORT_JSON_FILE | REPORT_HTML_FILE>

# Filters the given log files on the specified IPs to generate a targeted statistics report.
grep -i "IP1\|...\|IPn" <ACCESS_LOG_FILE | ACCESS_LOG_FILES> | goaccess -o <REPORT_CSV_FILE | REPORT_JSON_FILE | REPORT_HTML_FILE>

HTTP logs viewer

The http Logs Viewer application, formerly Apache Logs Viewer, supports various webservers logs (Apache, IIS, nginx, etc.) and allows filtering based on various fields.

Only limited functionalities are however available in the free version and some key features require the paid version (20$ for individuals, 70$ for corporations as of 2022-08).

Automated attack patterns detection

Apache access logs

The Scalp! Python script can be used in combination with the PHPIDS project's regular expression filters to automatically detect common attacks (SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), local and remote file inclusion, etc.). The PHPIDS project's default_filter.xml defines 78 optimized and tested regex.

Scalp! parses the specified Apache logs files and leverages the PHPIDS project's regular expressions to detect the matching attack patterns.

The analysis of 10 000 lines of logs takes around 90 seconds (on a i7-4700MQ CPU), and while Scalp! implements a time frame filter, the functionnality does not seem to be functionnal.

For larger Apache log files, the files can be splited in multiple parts and the analysis multi-threaded, to the maximun processing power, using the Linux xargs utility. Doing so, the analysis time of 100 000 lines of logs is reduced to around 200 seconds (on a i7-4700MQ CPU).

References

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/logs.html

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