A few days ago I wrote about my Emerging Threats sponsored work to support flowvars from Lua scripts in Suricata.

Today, I updated that support. Flowvar ‘sets’ are now real time. This was needed to fix some issues where a script was invoked multiple times in single rule, which can happen with some buffers, like HTTP headers.

Also, I implemented flowint support. Flowints in Suricata are integers stored in the flow context.

Example script:

function init (args)
    local needs = {}
    needs["http.request_headers"] = tostring(true)
    needs["flowint"] = {"cnt"}
    return needs
end

function match(args)
    a = ScFlowintGet(0);
    if a then
        ScFlowintSet(0, a + 1)
    else
        ScFlowintSet(0, 1)
    end 
        
    a = ScFlowintGet(0);
    if a == 23 then
        return 1
    end 
    
    return 0
end 

return 0

It does the same thing as this flowvar script:

function init (args)
    local needs = {}
    needs["http.request_headers"] = tostring(true)
    needs["flowvar"] = {"cnt"}
    return needs
end

function match(args)
    a = ScFlowvarGet(0);
    if a then
        a = tostring(tonumber(a)+1)
        ScFlowvarSet(0, a, #a)
    else
        a = tostring(1)
        ScFlowvarSet(0, a, #a)
    end 
    
    if tonumber(a) == 23 then
        return 1
    end
    
    return 0
end

return 0

Only, at about half the cost:

   Num      Rule         Gid      Rev      Ticks        %      Checks   Matches  Max Ticks   Avg Ticks   Avg Match   Avg No Match
  -------- ------------ -------- -------- ------------ ------ -------- -------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -------------- 
  1        1            1        0        2392221879   70.56  82249    795      834993      29085.12    6964.14     29301.02   
  2        2            1        0        998297994    29.44  82249    795      483810      12137.51    4019.44     12216.74