Tag Archives: inline

Compiling Suricata 0.9.0 in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 in IPS (inline) mode

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Note: the difference with the 0.8.2 post is that addition of libcap-ng-dev. This allows Suricata to run as an unprivileged user.

Here is how to compile Suricata 0.9.0 in inline mode on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04.

First, make sure you have the “universe” repository enabled. Go to the System menu, Administration, Software Sources. There enable “Community-maintained Open Source Software (universe)”. If you’re not running a gui, edit /etc/apt/sources.list and enable the universe repository there. Don’t forget doing an “apt-get update”.

Install the following packages needed to build Suricata: libpcre3-dev libpcap-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev libnfnetlink-dev libnetfilter-queue-dev libnet1-dev libcap-ng-dev.

apt-get install libpcre3-dev libpcap-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev libnfnetlink-dev libnetfilter-queue-dev libnet1-dev libcap-ng-dev

Download Suricata 0.9.0 here

Extract the suricata-0.9.0.tar.gz file as follows:

tar xzvf suricata-0.9.0.tar.gz

Enter the extracted directory suricata-0.9.0.

Run “./configure –enable-nfqueue”
If “./configure –enable-nfqueue” 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 0.9.0.

To use Suricata in inline mode, pass -q <queue id> to the command line. Example:

suricata -c /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml -q 0

Suricata 0.9.0 released

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Yesterday we released we first release candidate for our upcoming 1.0 release of Suricata. See the announcement on the OISF site here.

Most notable changes are the following new features:

– Support for the http_headers keyword was added
– libhtp was updated to version 0.2.3
– Privilege dropping using libcap-ng is now supported
– Proper support for “pass” rules was added
– Inline mode for Windows was added

Go get the release here: http://www.openinfosecfoundation.org/download/suricata-0.9.0.tar.gz

Compiling Suricata 0.8.2 in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 in IPS (inline) mode

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Yesterday I wrote about how to compile and install Suricata 0.8.2 as an IDS on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04, today I’ll explain the steps to compile and install it as an IPS. In IPS mode the engine runs in inline mode. This means that it gets it’s packets from netfilter and sets a verdict on them after inspecting them. This way we can drop packets that trigger the rules.

First, make sure you have the “universe” repository enabled. Go to the System menu, Administration, Software Sources. There enable “Community-maintained Open Source Software (universe)”. If you’re not running a gui, edit /etc/apt/sources.list and enable the universe repository there. Don’t forget doing an “apt-get update”.

Install the following packages needed to build Suricata: libpcre3-dev libpcap-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev libnfnetlink-dev libnetfilter-queue-dev libnet1-dev.

apt-get install libpcre3-dev libpcap-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev libnfnetlink-dev libnetfilter-queue-dev libnet1-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 –enable-nfqueue”
If “./configure –enable-nfqueue” 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 inline mode, pass -q <queue id> to the command line. Example:

suricata -c /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml -q 0

Snort_inline updated to 2.8.0.1 in SVN

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I’ve just committed an update to Snort_inline’s SVN. It brings it to the Snort 2.8.0.1 level. It supports both IPv4 and IPv6 on IPQ and NFQ. I have not been able to test IPFW on IPv6, so I don’t think that will work currently.

This update removes the libdnet dependency and replaces it with libnet 1.1. To be able to send ICMPv6 unreachable packets you will need the libnet 1.1 patch I wrote a while ago. You can find that here. Get the latest Snort_inline by checking out SVN:

svn co https://snort-inline.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/snort-inline/trunk

Consider the code to be of beta quality for now, so be careful with it. Please report any problems with it!

Again, a big thank you to NitroSecurity for funding this work!

Working on Snort_inline 2.8.0.1

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The last week I’ve been working on bringing Snort_inline to the Snort 2.8.0.1 level, including it’s IPv6 support. I’m almost ready to commit it to SVN, there are just some issues I need to fix in the inline specific code. The code will get rid of libdnet and use libnet 1.1 for sending reset/reject packets for both IPv4 and IPv6. After committing I will start working on getting the IPv6 features I wrote for NitroSecurity into this tree. This includes more matches, tunnel decoding (including for example the freenet6 tunnel, etc). So stay tuned!

Differences between Snort and Snort_inline

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Every few weeks the same question comes up: what is the difference between Snort in inline mode and Snort_inline. This makes sense, because the Snort_inline documentation and website fail to explain it. In this post I will try to highlight the main differences. In general I can say that we try to develop Snort_inline as a patchset on top of Snort. Snort_inline is focused at improving the inline part of Snort. Originally of course, Snort’s inline capabilities were developed in the Snort_inline project. With Snort 2.3.0RC1 they were merged into mainline Snort.

Convenience

We did a number of things to make Snort_inline a little more convenient for inline users.

  • inline is enabled by default in ./configure
  • we got rid of libnet 1.0.2a, switched to libdnet 1.1 instead
  • a snort_inline specific manual page was added, as well as some extra docs
  • a example configuration file for inline use is supplied

Added functionality

  • we support Linux’ new queue’ing mechanism called nfqueue. This was contributed by Nitro Security. Nfqueue supports running multiple copies of Snort_inline to take advantage of SMP and reduce risk of denial of service when Snort_inline should crash.
  • stickydrop preprocessor enables you to add options to the rules to block an ipaddress for a configurable amount of time
  • bait-and-switch preprocessor (Linux only) allows you to redirect traffic from a host to a honeypot based on the rules
  • clamav preprocessor is included (you still need to pass –enable-clamav to ./configure)
  • reinject action for FreeBSD: reinjects an accepted packet into the ipfw list at a specific rule number

Improved for inline use

  • reject action can send RST packets to both source and destination
  • stream4 can drop attacks detected in the reassembled stream. It also enforces the TCP window. It implements a number of ideas from Vern Paxson on TCP reassembly, such as a limit on the number of out of order packets and bytes that are accepted in a stream.
  • some fixes for FreeBSD

As the list shows, if you are interested in Snort running inline, using Snort_inline might be a better choice for you!