Collecting data reliably is one thing—understanding their origin is another challenge. Without reliable host attribution, vital context is lost, leaving security teams blind in critical moments. Axoflow’s built-in inventory solution enriches your security data with critical metadata (like the origin host) so you can pinpoint the exact source of every data entry, enabling precise routing and more informed security decisions.

Enterprises and organizations collect security data (like syslog and other event data) from various data sources, including:

• Network devices,
• Security devices,
• Servers,
• Applications,
• Cloud resources.

Designing and managing your data collection infrastructure to collect security data at scale securely and reliably, without losing data is a complex problem in its own right. However, even the organizations that get the collection right often fail at an important task: correlating the collected data to where it originates from. In other words, when looking at a particular log entry during a security incident, it’s not always trivial to determine what generated it. Was it an appliance or an application? Which team is the owner of the application or device? If it was a network device like a switch or a Wi-Fi access point (of which even medium-sized organizations have dozens), can you tell which one it was, and where is it located?

Cloud-native environments, like Kubernetes have addressed this issue using resource metadata. You can attach labels to every element of the infrastructure: containers, pods, nodes, and so on, to include region, role, owner or other custom metadata. When collecting log data from the applications running in containers, the log collector agent can retrieve these labels and attach them to the log data as metadata. This helps immensely to associate routing decisions and security conclusions with the source systems.

In non-cloud environments, like traditionally operated physical or virtual machine clusters, the logs of applications, appliances, and other data sources lack such labels. To identify the log source, you’re stuck with the sender’s IP address, the sender’s hostname, and in some cases the path and filename of the log file, plus whatever information is available in the log message.

Why isn’t the IP address or hostname enough?

• Source IP addresses are poor identifiers, as they aren’t strongly tied to the host, especially when they’re dynamically allocated using DHCP or when a group of senders are behind a NAT and have the same address.
• Some organizations encode metadata into the hostname or DNS record. However, compared to the volume of log messages, DNS resolving is slow. Also, the DNS record is available at the source, but might not be available at the log aggregation device or the log server. As a result, this data is often lost.
• Many data sources and devices omit important information from their messages. For example, the log messages of Cisco routers by default omit the hostname. (They can be configured to send their hostname, but unfortunately, often they aren’t.) You can resolve their IP address to obtain the hostname of the device, but that leads back to the problem in the previous point.
• In addition, all the above issues are rooted in human configuration practices, which tend to be the main cause of anomalies in the system.

The logs of many other devices and applications have similar problems.

Correlating data to data source

Some SIEMs (like IBM QRadar) rely on the sender IP address to identify the data source. Others, like Splunk, delegate the task of providing metadata to the collector agent, but log sources often don’t supply metadata, and even if they do, the information is based on IP address or DNS.

Certain devices, like Sonicwall firewalls include a unique device ID in the content of their log messages. Having access to this ID makes attribution straightforward, but this requires in-depth logging expertise, product-specific knowledge, and an extensive database of complex parsers. Therefore, logging solutions rarely extract such information. (Axoflow does.)

As you can see, identifying the sender of a log message and the environment it operates in is far from easy or straightforward. Organizations typically have a standard (or a custom-built) solution for asset management. However, even the standard ones are hard to integrate with a telemetry pipeline properly, thus reliable information is often not available in their SIEM, making it difficult to look up information about the data source.

The host attribution of the Axoflow Platform provides a solution to this problem. Axoflow builds an inventory to match the messages in your data flow to the available data sources. To do that, Axoflow uses various data, including:

• IP address, host name, and DNS records of the source (if available), and
• serial number, device ID, and other unique identifiers extracted from the messages.

In addition, Axoflow also classifies the processed log data to identify common vendors and products, and automatically applies labels to attach this information. By integrating the telemetry pipeline with external asset management systems allows you to further enrich your security data with custom labels and additional contextual information about your data sources. This automated process ensures that you always have up-to-date information in your logs. The system also alerts if a configuration anomaly is detected in the data flows.

Host attribution brings policy-based routing

As you can see, Axoflow provides a unique host attribution solution to correlate your incoming log data with your data sources. Why is that useful?

Host attribution gives you unprecedented possibilities to route your data. You can tell exactly what kind of data you want to send where. Not only based on technical parameters like sender IP or application name, but using a much more fine-grained inventory that includes information about the devices, their roles, and their location. For example:

• The vendor and the product (for example, a SonicWall firewall)
• The physical location of the device (geographical location, rack number)
• Owner of the device (organization/department/team)

Paired with the information from the content of the messages, all this metadata allows you to formulate high-level, declarative policies and alerts using the metadata labels, for example:

• Route the logs of devices to the owner’s Splunk index.
• Route every firewall and security log to a specific index.
• Let the different teams manage and observe their own devices.
• Granular access control based on relevant log content (for example, identify a proxy log-stream based on the upstream address), instead of just device access. 
• Ensure that specific logs won’t cross geographic borders, violating GDPR or other compliance requirements.

Summary

Accurately attributing security data to its source is crucial for effective security management, yet it’s a challenge many organizations struggle with. IP addresses and hostnames are often unreliable, and manually resolving data sources is time-consuming and error-prone. Axoflow’s host attribution solution offers a powerful alternative, automatically enriching logs with detailed metadata such as device ID, location, and ownership. This enables security teams to route data more efficiently and make faster, more informed decisions, ultimately improving the organization’s overall security posture.