topic Re: Enhancement Request: URL aggregator optimization in General Topics

Enhancement Request: URL aggregator optimization

rhagen — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 14:58:58 GMT

Today, the stdlib.aggregatorURL aggregator processes a list of URLs, removes duplicates, and manages withdrawals/whitelists. However, no optimization is performed on the output of this aggregator. I would like to recommend the following enhancements:

1. Removal of superfluous URLs

URLs that are made redundant by shorter, wildcard URLs should be removed from the output list.

Example:

*.domain.com

subdomain.domain.com <-- REMOVE

host.subdomain.domain.com <-- REMOVE

2. Convert to lowercase before removing duplicate URLs

The aggregator output today could include duplicate URLs containing mixed case letters. This can be addressed by converting all URL strings to lowercase before the removal of duplicates.

Example:

login.microsoftonline.com
Login.microsoftonline.com

3. Sorted output

This one is more cosmetic in nature, but it will help users when troubleshooting. Sorting the aggregator output will help save time when firewall adminsitrators need to look up URLs received in an EDL. Today, the output is not sorted.

Re: Enhancement Request: URL aggregator optimization

lmori — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 08:36:04 GMT

1) and 2) should be supported by a URL-specific aggregator. ER#9 has been open to track this.

Output list are sorted indeed, but by default they are sorted based on the time of update. Most recent entries at the top of the list.

Re: Enhancement Request: URL aggregator optimization

Greg_R — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 11:55:22 GMT

Not to derail the original post, but are all the output lists (IPv4 specifically) sorted with the newest ones at the top? I ask as I am trying to solve for how to handle the lower EBL counts on the PA-500 and PA-3020.

Re: Enhancement Request: URL aggregator optimization

lmori — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 13:24:41 GMT

Hi greg.rohel,

yes, same applies to all the list generated by Output nodes of class RedisSet (all the "feed*" prototypes are based on this class).

To cope with platforms limits you can split the lists in multiple sublists using the s and n URL parameters:

Examples:

- topmost 1000 elements of the list

https://<minemeld>/feeds/feed1?n=1000

- elements 1000-2000 of the list

https://<minemeld>/feeds/feed1?s=1000&n=1000

The indicator value used to sort the list is configurable by changing the prototype (and this will be possible in the next release of MM). The parameter is called scoring_attribute and by default it is set to last_seen.