Kolide, an endpoint security company built around osquery, writes about device security, workplace privacy, and employee monitoring.
HN commenters mostly cite it as a product and company, including its CEO and co-founder commenting on osquery, and mention its Go Kit style use.
Kolide | C++ Software Engineer on osquery | Fully Remote | Fulltime | https://kolide.com/osquery
Hey there! Mike Arpaia here, a Co-Founder of a host endpoint company called Kolide (https://kolide.com) and the original creator of the open-source security software osquery (https://github.com/facebook/osquery) which I put together as a solution to Facebook's HIDS problem when I worked there as an engineer.
Kolide is building a team of software engineers to work on and contribute to the osquery codebase, which is an open-source C++ project. Open sourced by Facebook in 2014, osquery is an operating system instrumentation and analysis framework which solves a variety of monitoring and instrumentation use-cases. Since its release, osquery has become one of the most popular open source security software projects on all of GitHub with over 9,000 stars and 1,000 forks.
The osquery engineering team at Kolide, led by me, the progenitor of the osquery project, will focus on improving the open source codebase for all users of osquery. Engineers will work closely with members of the core osquery team, osquery community members, and other Kolide employees to prioritize features and collaborate on development. Due to the distributed nature of the osquery open source project, this is a completely remote role; Candidates should feel comfortable working independently in a distributed fashion.
The following attributes would be true of an ideal candidate:
- Extensive experience writing…
Kolide's CEO here! (https://kolide.com)
We have been a big part of the Osquery community for a while and we think it's an awesome project that can be used to get an insane level of visibility across your fleet. We also think in the context of rolling this out to end-users, companies need to really consider the privacy implications of the data Osquery is capable of collecting.
To that end, we soft-launched a product in May that helps fast growing tech companies use tools like Osquery to implement something called User Focused Security. User Focused Security involves treating employees like adults and understanding the context in which they work before rolling out a security strategy.
We want to be the best choice for organizations that want to get serious about the security of their laptops but don't want to lock-down devices, violate their user's privacy, or hurt their internal culture with opaque surveillance.
The three values that we use to build our software:
1. User Education over Enforcement
2. Trust through Transparency
3. Quality conclusions over Quantity of data
We use Osquery because it helps us fulfill that second value by giving end-users visibility into what is running on their device.
If your team uses Slack and want to see our approach you should check us out at https://kolide.com
Official blog post by 1Password: https://blog.1password.com/1password-acquires-kolide/ posted in HN submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39442243
Official blog post by Kolide: https://www.kolide.com/blog/1password-acquires-kolide posted in HN submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39441806
All these HN submissions should be merged.
Kolide’s post has the usual corporate fluff:
> First, Kolide’s product isn’t going anywhere. More importantly, we (the humans of Kolide) aren’t going anywhere. As part of 1Password, we expect our roadmap to both accelerate and become more ambitious. As a fully intact team, we are continuing to build, iterate, support, and sell Kolide within 1Password. If your experience with us changes, our expectation is that it’s only because it got better.
Based on 1Password’s hostile attitude to its customers and its money hungry business model, I would think twice before starting to using Kolide at this point.
At [Kolide](https://kolide.com/) we're heavy users of Go Kit, and as a result have also adopted a lot of the style Peter recommends here. We've been slowly expanding on it with a style guide and company specific set of common libraries [here](https://github.com/kolide/kit#kolide-kit). My coworker also wrote a [blog post](https://blog.kolide.com/using-go-for-scalable-operating-system-analytics-cb170d85b1c5) on how Go has been fantastic for us and references the above style guide.
The code from go kit and [oklog](https://github.com/oklog/oklog) are great examples of idiomatic Go.
Unfortunately the community at large doesn't really follow the "no init"/"no package global vars", which can sometimes lead to bad experiences importing opensource Go libs.
I can't remember the names of any of these companies, but I know there's a healthy ecosystem of "endpoint management" businesses that sell essentially this service (among other things, like endpoint security monitoring/EDR).
The downside is then that you're running an ultra-privileged agent on each developer machine, with no particular guarantee that said agent is more secure than any given piece of software despite having way more power.
Edit: Remembered one: you could use something like Kolide[1], which more or less wraps osquery[2] to enumerate applications and their versions, and push out warnings asking users to upgrade.
[1]: https://www.kolide.com/
[2]: https://www.osquery.io/
You might try an endpoint security product like Kolide with a single-user org. Perhaps, it sounds like overkill, but there's a free trial period that you could use to button up any loose ends specifically.
https://www.kolide.com/
I also run Malwarebytes regularly. It's never found anything for me personally, but I'm a very cautious user, and others I've recommended it to have found meaningful results that they didn't know otherwise.