Broker: Bro’s Messaging Library

The Broker library implements Bro’s high-level communication patterns:

• remote logging
• remote printing
• remote events
• distributed data stores

Logging, printing, and events all follow a pub/sub communication model between Broker endpoints that are directly peered with each other. An endpoint also has the option of subscribing to its own messages. Subscriptions are matched prefix-wise and endpoints have the capability of fine-tuning the subscription topic strings they wish to advertise to peers as well as the messages they wish to send to them.

The distributed data store functionality allows a master data store associated with one Broker endpoint to be cloned at peer endpoints which may then perform lightweight, local queries against the clone, which automatically stays synchronized with the master store. Clones cannot modify their content directly, instead they send modifications to the centralized master store which applies them and then broadcasts them to all clones.

Applications which integrate the Broker library may communicate with each other using the above-mentioned patterns which are common to Bro.

Dependencies

Compiling Broker requires the following libraries/tools to already be installed:

A C++11 capable compiler (GCC 4.8+ or Clang 3.3+)

CAF (C++ Actor Framework) version 0.14+

https://github.com/actor-framework/actor-framework

CMake 2.8+

CMake is a cross-platform, open-source build system, typically not installed by default. See http://www.cmake.org for more information regarding CMake and the installation steps below for how to use it to build this distribution. CMake generates native Makefiles that depend on GNU Make by default.

And optionally:

SWIG 3.0.3+, http://www.swig.org/

SWIG is used to optionally build Python bindings for Broker.

Compiling/Installing

To compile and install in to /usr/local:

./configure
make
make install

See ./configure --help for more advanced configuration options.

Documentation

Please see the Broker User Manual for more documentation and examples of how to use the library.