I’ve been thinking about how to deal with streams in the OISF engine. We need to do stream reassembly to be able to handle spliced sessions, otherwise it would be very easy to evade detection. Snort traditionally used an approach of inspecting the packets individually and reassembling (part of) the stream in a pseudo packet, that was inspected mostly like a normal packet. Recent Snort versions, especially when Stream5 was introduced, have a so called stream api. This enables detection modules to control the reassembly better.

In Snort_inline’s Stream4 I’ve been experimenting with ways to improve stream reassembly in an inline setup. The problem with Snort’s pseudo packet scanning way of operation is that it’s after the fact scanning. Which means that any threat detected in the reassembled stream can’t be dropped anymore. The way I tried to work around this was by constantly scanning a sliding window of reassembled unacked data. It worked quite well, except for the performance of it. That was quite bad.

I’m thinking about a stream reassembler for the OISF engine that can both do the after-the-fact pseudo packet scanning and do a sliding window approach as I did in stream4inline. This would be used for the normal tcp signatures. I think it should be possible to determine the minimal size of the reassembled packet based on the signatures per port, possibly more fine grained. Of course things like target based reassembly and robust reassembly will be part of it.

In addition to this I’m thinking about a way to make modules act on the stream similary to how programs deal with sockets. Code that only wakes up if a new piece of data in that connection is received, with semantics similar to recv()/read(). I haven’t really made up my mind about how such an api should work exactly, but I think it would be very useful to detection module writers if they only have to care about handling the next chunk of data.

I haven’t implemented any of this yet, but I plan to start working on this soon. I’ll start with simple TCP state tracking that I’m planning to build on top of the flow handling already implemented. I’ll blog about this as I go…