The Kolide Osquery Launcher is a lightweight launcher/manager which offers a few extra capabilities on top of osquery:

• secure automatic updates of osquery
• many additional tables
• tooling to generate deployment packages for a variety of platforms

The documentation for this project is included on GitHub in the docs subdirectory of the repository.

Osquery is statically linked and that allows for the easy bundling and distribution of capabilities. Unfortunately, however, it also implies that you have to maintain excellent osquery update hygiene in order to take advantage of emerging osquery capabilities.

The Launcher includes the ability to securely manage and autoupdate osquery instances. This is implemented using The Update Framework (TUF). TUF defines a specification for secure software update systems. The spec describes a client/server model where the client is the software to be updated and the server is the update server. For our implementation, we use Docker Notary as our TUF server and a Go client library that we built in-house.

Because we understand the security implications of an osquery autoupdater, NCC Group was contracted to perform a security audit of our in-house TUF client library. This report is available for public review. NCC Group has also previously performed assessments on Docker Notary and Osquery as well.

Osquery has a very extensible plugin architecture that allow it to be heavily customized with plugins. The included TLS plugins are used by many existing osquery management servers, but the design of the TLS API leaves much to be desired. The Launcher includes a set of gRPC plugins for remote communication with a gRPC server. The server specification is independently published and versioned.

Osquery exposes a lot of information, but there is always more. Launcher includes all of the Kolide tables exposing a wealth of additional information.

The osqueryd binary was designed to be very configurable, which allows it to be used in very different environments. The Launcher wraps osqueryd configuration and exposes very high-level options that allow you to easily connect osquery to a server that is compliant with the gRPC specification

To learn about The Launcher's command-line interface, see the Launcher documentation.

Deploying osquery and configuring it to communicate with a management server can be complicated, especially if you have to make customized deployment packages. The Launcher includes a tool called package-builder which you can use to create Launcher packages for your organization.

To learn more about using package-builder to package and deploy osquery, check out the documentation.

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