Bro IDS ships with a communication library, called broker.

This repo provides some general purpose templates to write applications, that communicate via broker.

The project is structured as follows (see the folders):

• apps that send to a bro (app-to-bro)
• apps that receive from a bro (bro-to-app)
• apps that communicate solely via broker, without any bro instance (app-to-app)

You need to install broker. Please refer to the official docs for any details. Also see the Dockerfile for an example.

The broker installation will bring two things:

• shared object files / libraries to link against
• python bindings

When calling make install with the default configuration it will put the shared object files in /usr/local/lib. So when you want to link against it (c++), then make sure you set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH accordingly, such that it includes /usr/local/lib. Python bindings will be put into /usr/lib/python3.<X>/site-packages/broker. Examples in this repo are meant to use python3 only.

Each directory comes with 2 application files

• a python application
• a c++ application

Compile the C++ files with

g++ -std=c++11 -lbroker -lcaf_core -lcaf_io -lcaf_openssl -o <executable name> <source.cc>

Optionally, you will find one or more .bro scripts in there, in case the example app is communicating to a bro instance. To use those .bro scripts you need to install bro. Or you put that into a container as well.

In case you have a bro installed, run the scripts with (example call):

/usr/local/bro/bin/bro ping-pong/ping_pong.bro