SharpHound Enterprise System Requirements and Deployment Process

The SharpHound Enterprise service is a critical element in your deployment that collects and uploads data about your environment to your BloodHound Enterprise instance for processing and analysis.

SharpHound Enterprise is deployed as a signed Windows service, runs under the context of a domain account, and collects from one or more domains utilizing the configured service account.

Deployment Process Overview

To collect Active Directory data with SharpHound and ingest it into BloodHound for analysis:

1. Provision a Server that meets or exceeds the recommended Hardware, Software, and Network requirements below.
2. Create a Service Account or gMSA that SharpHound will run as with the Service Account Requirements below.
3. Install and Upgrade SharpHound Enterprise
4. Create a BloodHound Enterprise collector client
5. Run an On Demand Scan or Create a data collection schedule

Server Requirements

Hardware

Resource	Minimum	Recommended	Large enterprise
Processor Cores	2 physical cores	4 physical cores	6 physical cores
Memory	4GB RAM	16GB RAM	32GB RAM
Hard disk space	1GB for logging	5GB for logging	20GB for logging

These recommendations should be considered a baseline and may need to be increased depending on the size and complexity of your environments.

Minimums apply to test or development deployments. Where multiple collectors are deployed on a single host, scaling wll be necessary to maintain performance.

Software

• Windows Server 2019+
• .NET 4.7.2+

Network

• TLS on 443/TCP to your BloodHound Enterprise SaaS tenant URL (proxy is supported)
• LDAP to at least one domain controller in each domain requiring collection.
  • By default, SharpHound will attempt LDAP over SSL first, then fall back to LDAP if SSL is unavailable.
    • LDAP over SSL on 636/TCP (configurable port)
    • LDAP on 389/TCP (configurable port)
  • LDAP over SSL is enforceable.
  • LDAP channel signing is used for all queries.
• [Optional] If performing privileged collection (see Why perform privileged collection in SharpHound)
  • SMB/RPC on 445/TCP to all in-scope domain-joined Windows systems
  • SMB/RPC on 135/TCP to all in-scope domain-joined Windows systems for NTLM relay-based collection
  • Approximately 60-100kB network bandwidth per collection to each in-scope domain-joined Windows system
• [Optional] If performing DC Registry and CA Registry collection (see DC Registry and CA Registry details)
  • SMB/RPC on 445/TCP to all DCs and domain-joined CAs

Service Account Requirements

The SharpHound Enterprise service will run as a domain-joined account and will utilize the permissions of that account for enumeration purposes.

• Authenticated User within any domains requiring collection
• Granted “Log on as a service” User Rights Assignment on the SharpHound Enterprise server
• [Optional] If performing privileged collection (see Why perform privileged collection in SharpHound)
  • Member of the local Administrators group on all in-scope domain-joined Windows systems
  • SharpHound’s privileged collection may also use RPC over 135/TCP to support NTLM relay-based collection. When enabling privileged/NTLM relay collection, ensure any firewall rules and endpoint protections allow RPC endpoint mapper traffic (135/TCP) as required.
• [Optional] If performing DC Registry and CA Registry collection (see DC Registry and CA Registry details)
  • Member of the local Administrators group on all domain controllers and domain-joined certificate authorities
• [Optional]: If Active Directory tombstoning is enabled
  • Read privileges to the Deleted Objects container (see How to let non-administrators view the Active Directory deleted objects container)

See SharpHound Data Collection and Permissions for comprehensive requirement information.