Monthly Archives: April 2010

Compiling Suricata 0.8.2 in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 in IDS mode

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The newly released Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS looks like a good platform for running an IDS on. It’s up to date and has long term support. Here is how to compile and install Suricata 0.8.2 on it.

Install the following packages needed to build Suricata: libpcre3-dev libpcap-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev.

apt-get install libpcre3-dev libpcap-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev

Download Suricata 0.8.2 here

Extract the suricata-0.8.2.tar.gz file as follows:

tar xzvf suricata-0.8.2.tar.gz

Enter the extracted directory suricata-0.8.2.

Run “./configure”
Note that you may get a warning about libnet 1.1 that is missing. You can ignore that, it’s only used in IPS/inline mode currently.
If “./configure” was succesful, run “make”
If “make” was succesful, run “sudo make install”
Except for Suricata itself, the build process installed “libhtp”. For that to work properly, run “ldconfig”.

Run “suricata -V” and it should report version 0.8.2.

To use Suricata in IDS mode, pass -i to the command line. Example

suricata -c /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml -i eth0

Removing Trac ticket comment spam in Debian Lenny

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The Vuurmuur website runs Trac and overall I’m pretty happy with it. The only thing that Trac doesn’t do well, is dealing with spammers. Spammers target Trac a lot, so that’s a real problem.

To prevent spammers from making it through, I run Scallywhack and a number of custom ModSecurity rules. So far, spams only made it through as new tickets in the ticket tracker, so I installed the TicketDeletePlugin.

Yesterday, I saw the first spam as a comment to an existing and valid ticket. Like tickets themselves, ticket comments can not be removed by Trac by default. Luckily, upstream Trac seems to have fixed this. I’m running Debian’s version of Trac 0.11.1 however, so I decided to patch that. The patches in the Trac ticket #454 didn’t apply cleanly, so I had to patch it manually. To save others the work, it’s available here: http://www.inliniac.net/files/trac_0.11.1-debian-comment_edit.patch

To use it, make a copy of your /usr/share/pyshared/trac directory.
Next, go into the trac directory and run the command:
patch -p1 < /path/to/trac_0.11.1-debian-comment_edit.patch

After this, each comment in the comment system will have a “edit” button and you can remove the spam message content. It’s not possible to remove the entire comment, but this works for me.

Suricata 0.8.2 released

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Today the OISF development team released 0.8.2 of the Suricata IDS/IPS engine. I feel this is definitely the best release so far. Read the announcement here. In short, stability was improved, memory footprint reduced, performance improved and new features were added.

One of the tools we used to help improve the engine is a fuzzer created by Will Metcalf, our QA lead. In short, the script takes a pcap file, runs it through editcap (part of wireshark) altering a number of random bytes, then feeds the altered pcap file to Suricata. This resulted in many interesting corner cases. Naturally the script makes sure you don’t forget to enable “ulimit -c unlimited” and such 🙂 More on that script can be found on Will’s blog node5.

For the next period we’ll be working on resolving a number of open issues. There are still a number of improvements we need to make to the relation between our app layer decoding modules and our detection engine. Next to this we’re still missing support for a number of rule keywords, such as asn1 and http_headers. We’re also working on getting our CUDA accelaration into a more usable shape. This release improved it slightly, by making it work on x86_64, but it’s still not useful in production environments.

So as usual, enough to do! Meanwhile, we’re looking for feedback on our release!