Malcolm v26.07.0

Malcolm v26.07.0 adds IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC 104) protocol support using CERT.LV's Zeek plugin, including Logstash parsing, ECS normalization, Arkime fields, and a new OpenSearch Dashboards dashboard. This release also fixes three archive extraction and authentication security vulnerabilities; improves NetBox enrichment configuration; and addresses PostgreSQL major version upgrade, custom CA certificate for KeyCloak, container health check, privilege-drop signal chaining, and configuration script issues. Arkime, Zeek, Fluent Bit, Filebeat, Logstash, Supercronic, and Alpine-based images have been updated as well.

If you are upgrading from an existing Malcolm installation, run ./scripts/status for Malcolm to migrate some settings prior to running ./scripts/configure, ./scripts/start, or other Malcolm control scripts.

v26.06.1...v26.07.0

• ✨ Features and enhancements

  • Add IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC 104) support using the CERT.LV spicy-iec104 Zeek plugin, including Zeek log ingestion, ECS field mapping, Arkime fields, and an IEC 104 dashboard #939
  • Make LOGSTASH_NETBOX_ENRICHMENT_DATASETS more flexible: it now accepts default, ics/ot, all, explicit provider.dataset values, and combinations such as default,ics #1037
  • Allow LOGSTASH_NETBOX_ENRICHMENT_DATASETS to be configured through checkboxes in the configuration TUI #1033
  • Improve ./scripts/start error messages by listing missing or invalid authentication-related files instead of reporting only a generic authentication setup failure #865
  • Have system-quickstart detect and prepopulate existing time synchronization settings when rerun #992

• 🛡️ Security Remediation & Hardening

  • Fix an RBAC bypass caused by URI normalization differences between Nginx location matching and the Lua authorization layer CVE-2026-63177 #1042
  • Fix path traversal in archive extraction directory handling by validating resolved paths and using libarchive's secure extraction flags CVE-2026-63134 #1040
  • Limit archive entry count, nesting depth, and total expanded size to prevent inode- and resource-exhaustion denial of service during extraction CVE-2026-63133 #1041
  • Mark OpenID Connect session cookies as secure and improve handling of externally forwarded HTTPS schemes

• 🐛 Bug fixes

  • Allow the configuration TUI to reset supported variables back to empty values after installation #1024, #1030
  • Fix the broken signal chain in docker-uid-gid-setup.sh so signals reach the final process after dropping privileges #1039 to ensure clean shutdown of containers
  • Fix PostgreSQL being reported unhealthy after a major-version upgrade, improve upgrade-state handling, and perform required post-upgrade extension and collation maintenance #1038
  • Fix the Nginx Lua/OpenID Connect helper not honoring user-provided CA certificates for KeyCloak when KEYCLOAK_SSL_VERIFY=true #1035
  • Restore curl to the the htadmin container for use by the health check script #1029
  • Reduce the size of the OpenSearch Dashboards image by copying only the permissions data needed from its upstream image layer #1031
  • Fix JSON handling of several Zeek fields whose names contain dots by normalizing them to underscore-separated field names
  • Fix additional Zeek and Suricata field normalization and ECS mapping inconsistencies found while updating dashboards and index templates

• ✅ Component version updates

  • Arkime to v6.6.0
    • This update contains a major speed-up when loading the SPIView and Connections pages
  • Zeek to v8.2.1 #970
  • Fluent Bit Windows installer helper to v5.0.9
  • Filebeat OSS to v9.4.3
  • Logstash OSS to v9.4.3
  • Supercronic to v0.2.47
  • Alpine Linux base images to v3.24
  • KeyCloak to 26.6.4
  • cryptography (Python library) to v48.0.1 to address security advisory GHSA-537c-gmf6-5ccf

• 🧹 Code and project maintenance

  • Broad spelling, grammar, naming consistency, and documentation cleanup across scripts, configuration, dashboards, and documentation #990
  • Expand and restructure documentation to provide better project context for developers and LLM-assisted code analysis #964
    • Malcolm Dashboard Reference
    • Search Queries in Arkime and OpenSearch Dashboards
  • Improve installer validation, environment-variable mapping tests, and configuration item metadata
  • Refresh dashboards, index templates, field mappings, protocol documentation, and navigation links

• 📄 Configuration changes for Malcolm (in environment variables in ./config/). The Malcolm control script (e.g., ./scripts/status, ./scripts/start) automatically handles creation and migration of variables according to ./config/env-var-actions.yml.

  • LOGSTASH_NETBOX_ENRICHMENT_DATASETS in logstash.env now defaults to default and may contain default, ics/ot, all, explicit provider.dataset values, or a comma-separated combination of these values
  • ZEEK_DISABLE_ICS_IEC104 in zeek.env controls whether the IEC 104 Zeek plugin is disabled
  • SAFE_EXTRACT_MAX_ENTRIES, SAFE_EXTRACT_MAX_DEPTH, and SAFE_EXTRACT_MAX_BYTES in upload-common.env set archive extraction resource limits for uploaded archive files (e.g., containing Zeek logs for processing); their defaults are 5,000 entries, 20 directory levels, and 4 GiB of expanded data

• ❌ Errata

  • Post-release, a Strelka bug was found which can cause the strelka-backend container's work process to crash on aarch64 platforms (#1046). A followup v26.07.1 release addressing this issue is forthcoming.

Malcolm is a powerful, easily deployable network 🖧 traffic analysis tool suite for network security monitoring 🕵🏻‍♀️.

Malcolm operates as a cluster of containers 📦, isolated sandboxes which each serve a dedicated function of the system. This makes Malcolm deployable with frameworks like Docker 🐋, Podman 🦭, and Kubernetes ⎈. Check out the Quick Start guide for examples on how to get up and running.

Alternatively, dedicated official ISO installer images 💿 for Malcolm and Hedgehog Linux 🦔 can be downloaded from Malcolm's releases page on GitHub. Due to limits on individual files in GitHub releases, these ISO files have been split 🪓 into 2GB chunks and can be reassembled with scripts provided for both Bash 🐧 (release_cleaver.sh) and PowerShell 🪟 (release_cleaver.ps1). See Downloading Malcolm - Installer ISOs for instructions.

As always, join us on the Malcolm discussions board 💬 to engage with the community, or pop some corn 🍿 and watch a video 📼.