DO NOT MERGE: METRON-1086: Create a Blockly-based user interface for Stellar

[merrimanr]

Contributor Comments

This PR is a first look at the Blockly/Stellar integration with a working example. This is POC quality code and has a long way to go. This is just an initial preview to kick off the discussion, gather requirements, and work out a design.

To take it for a test drive, spin up full dev and bring up the Management UI. Open the threat triage panel on the bro (or any) sensor and add the rule EXISTS(ip_src_addr):

Click the Save button and then click on the block icon for the newly created rule. This will open the Stellar Blockly editor:

You will notice the rule that was just created is now represented as a series of connected blocks with the rule displayed in a text box just below. You can edit the rule by dragging, dropping and interacting with various blocks that represent Stellar operators and functions. Try changing the rule to EXISTS(ip_src_addr) && IS_DOMAIN(host) like this:

The && operator is under the Boolean category in the toolbox to the left. The IS_DOMAIN function is under Stellar -> Domain. The purple block with the value set to host represents a list of fields parsed from the json in the SAMPLE widget at the top. This block is in the Fields category. If the host field doesn't appear in the dropdown try getting new samples (right arrow) until you get a message that contains that field:

Once you get the correct Stellar statement, save the sensor config:

Open that rule again with the Blockly editor and you should see the block statement you just created:

This preview contains only a subset of Stellar features and is very much incomplete. There is much more work to do. For this demo it is shown in context of the threat triage editor but could be used anywhere Stellar is exposed. For now I will leave you with this and let you form your own opinions about what it should evolve to. After people have had a chance to see it, we can continue the discussion on where this should go next.

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[JonZeolla]

Is this ready for initial testing? I would be happy to take this for a ride, but it seems to be having some travis (RAT only?) issues, and has a conflicted package.json.

[ottobackwards]

We should make this a feature branch

[ottobackwards]

I will repeat that this should be a feature branch. What are we going to do here? This is just sitting here getting more and more out of date.

[merrimanr]

Sorry for ignoring this for so long. This is going to be a fairly complex module to maintain and it is VERY tightly coupled with Stellar. This means that if we want to officially add this feature it will place an additional and substantial burden on people making changes to Stellar.

I am happy to lead this but it should be something that is overwhelmingly supported by the community. It will take a lot of effort from multiple people to make this comprehensive and robust. I would need volunteers to help me.

Might make sense to revive this once we are confident Stellar is very stable and won't change much. Not sure if that will ever happen since it's so flexible and has already evolved so much :)

[ottobackwards]

I would be happy to help, I think I have a decent handle with the stellar side, and could get up to speed on the ui stuff with your help.

Think about how we can go about it.
I think I would need to understand better how this works, what tightly coupled means etc. Maybe we can slice this up between ui and backend?

[lvets]

I can help out with testing wherever possible. This is a very cool feature...

[mmiklavc]

What's the state of this?

[ottobackwards]

I don't think anything has been done with this. The feature branch wasn't made....

[ottobackwards]

We should close this until we are ready for a feature branch

[ottobackwards]

I actually think in the future this should be a stellar project / feature, then integrated after with metron. So that any ui can do stellar blockly