Elkeid is a high-performance, open-source Host-Based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) built by ByteDance to secure Linux workloads across cloud, container, and hybrid environments.
If tools like OSSEC or Snort feel dated in your K8s stack or Falco is too noisy, Elkeid offers a modern alternative with eBPF-based syscall monitoring, Kafka-backed pipelines, and plugin-driven detection logic.
Think: cloud-native HIDS meets event-driven XDR.
Why Elkeid?
Elkeid was developed to protect ByteDance’s massive infrastructure. Now open-sourced under Apache 2.0, it delivers:
- Kernel-level telemetry via eBPF, Netlink, and ptrace
- Scalable architecture using Kafka, MongoDB, and Redis
- Plugin-based detection with Go and Lua support
- A rules engine for suspicious behavior, persistence, privilege escalation, and more
- Elastic deployment across containers, cloud VMs, and edge hosts
It fills the gap between SIEM noise and raw audit logs with detection logic that actually works in modern infrastructure.
What It Detects
Elkeid detects behavior such as:
- Suspicious parent-child process chains
- Shells spawned inside containers
- Reverse shells, bind shells, and privilege escalation attempts
- Persistence indicators such as crontab tampering or systemd injection
- Anomalous syscalls from non-root users
These events are ingested into Kafka, analyzed by the Elkeid Detector, and visualized via a real-time dashboard or exported to your own alerting stack.
Elkeid provides context beyond what most open-source HIDS can—correlating process lineage, syscall flow, and container identity.
Architecture Overview
Elkeid is agent-based and modular by design.
- Elkeid Agent: Installed on every endpoint, container, or node. Collects telemetry and pushes to Kafka.
- Detector: Evaluates events against custom rules and plugins.
- Controller: Manages rules, plugins, and policies.
- Dashboard: For alerts, logs, and visibility.
- Infra Dependencies: Kafka, Redis, and MongoDB handle event flow and state.
This structure allows Elkeid to scale horizontally with your workloads—whether a dozen VMs or a global container fleet.
Installation and Setup
Elkeid is not a plug-and-play tool, but the setup is straightforward if you’re comfortable with container orchestration.
Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/bytedance/Elkeid cd Elkeid/demo docker-compose up |
Final Take
Elkeid is a serious contender in the next generation of host-based detection. It’s cloud-native, plugin-friendly, and built for scale.
If you’re operating a modern stack—especially Kubernetes or containerized workloads—Elkeid is worth testing. It gives you insight, context, and detection without relying on flaky heuristics or black-box engines.
For the price of zero, you get ByteDance-grade endpoint telemetry and a flexible rule engine.