Check impact of GRR API change on PowerGRR

[Karneades]

From: in https://github.com/google/grr/releases/tag/v3.4.9.0-release

The APIv1 will be removed. If you use the GRR API Python client library, you shouldn't notice anything. If you use direct HTTP JSON requests to talk to GRR AdminUI, you need to ensure that you're using APIv2 (contains /v2/ in the URLs).

@mbushkov We use <GRR server>/api/... for the API calls. Could you maybe already see an impact of the mentioned API changes for PowerGRR? Will that /api/ endpoint be removed? And we should replace it with v2 and adapt the API calls according to the new scheme?

[Karneades]

Ref: https://github.com/swisscom/PowerGRR/blob/d07eac30942080407cff6cdb2414d80388a7b71a/PowerGRR.psm1#L2825C33-L2825C38

            'Uri' = "$($GRRUrl)/api/$Url";

[mbushkov]

Hi Andreas! Yes, unfortunately PowerGRR would need to be migrated to the API v2 scheme. API v1 and v2 deal with the same data and are backed by the same protobuf definitions, but they use different approached to convert the protobufs to JSON. API v1 uses an ad-hoc GRR-specific mechanism, and API v2 uses an official protobuf JSON standard: https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/json/

We tried to keep the API v1 afloat for as long as it was possible, but unfortunately it became a blocker for a major refactoring that we're doing and we have little choice but to deprecate it.

Would it be feasible for PowerGRR to migrate? The URLs stay generally the same (aside from the v2 in the URL path), but the parsing of JSON received from GRR and JSON that you send to GRR via POST requests would need to be adjusted.

[Karneades]

I think the only places to adapt the JSON handling is here - maybe someone with a working GRR environment can adapt it as I currently don't have one.

The function Invoke-GRRRequest handles all the API calls and returns the parsed JSON:

PowerGRR/PowerGRR.psm1

Line 2941 in d07eac3

$ret.Substring(5) | ConvertFrom-Json

All functions provide a -ShowJSON parameter which one can use to see what exactly is sent back from the server for correct parsing. Example: https://github.com/swisscom/PowerGRR/blob/master/docs/Get-GRRArtifact.md#syntax.

The other place is in the same function, replace api with v2:

PowerGRR/PowerGRR.psm1

Line 2825 in d07eac3

'Uri' = "$($GRRUrl)/api/$Url";

Then only one other function also includes a JSON handling:

PowerGRR/PowerGRR.psm1

Line 214 in d07eac3

if ($ret -and ($ret.substring(5) | ConvertFrom-Json).items)