How to get Ranflood working

Sources and Installation

Ranflood’s source code is hosted within the Flooding-against-Ransomware GitHub organisation in the repository https://github.com/Flooding-against-Ransomware/ranflood.

A brief overview on Ranflood's architecture

Ranflood follows the well-known client-daemon pattern (like Docker or systemd). The daemon is an always-active component, and it is used both to take snapshots of files and to execute flooding commands. The expected configuration for Ranflood deployments is thus to have one daemon running on a given machine, while several clients can connect to the same daemon. The daemon is a process in the background, not associated with a particular user, and users/programs interact with it with lightweight, asynchronous clients/interfaces (at the moment, the Ranflood daemon supports client interaction through the ZeroMQ protocol).

Installing Ranflood using the compiled binaries

The Ranflood repository hosts also all version releases, which includes native executables for Windows, macOS, and Windows, as well as a Java version that can run on any environment that supports the Java Virtual Machine.

The release archives contain both the Ranflood client and daemon for the selected environment---one can also mix different executables, e.g., if the user needs to control a Windows computer where the daemon is running from a Linux administration node.

After having downloaded the binaries of Ranflood, you can execute following the steps below:

  • uncompress the downloaded ZIP archive, which contains both the daemon (called ranfloodd) and the client (ranflood);
  • make sure both binaries have executable permissions (e.g., in macOs/Linux with the command chmod +x ranflood*);
  • move both binaries in a suitable location on the disk. We suggest having both executables in the local PATH, so that they are generally available (e.g., by typing their name in a terminal prompt).
  • (optional) you can already configure the daemon before starting it through its settings file, e.g., see the illustrative settings.ini file in the Ranflood’s repository;
  • start the daemon (ranfloodd)—our suggestion is to make it a system service launched with elevated rights at startup;
  • start the client (ranflood) to interact with the daemon (e.g., launch/stop ransomware countermeasures and check their status). To lean what commands you can issue to the Ranflood daemon, launch the client without parameters or with the command ranflood --help.

Installing Ranflood from the sources

The Ranflood project is currently written in Java and uses the GraalVM compiler to generate native executables for the main operating systems, without requiring the installation/presence of the Java Runtime Environment.

To compile the project from its sources, you need Java 18 and Gradle 7.0. Download the code from the GitHub repository and use the included gradle script to compile it with the following commands:

  • gradle jar generates the jar executables of both the client and the daemon;
  • gradle clientNativeImage and gradle clientNativeImage respectively generate the native executable of the client and the daemon for the host operating system (the process might require the installation of GraalVM 22);