Tag Archives: IPS

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

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!

Suricata released!

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Today we’ve finally released the first public version of Suricata, the Open Source IDS/IPS developed by the Open Information Security Foundation. With a team of great people we’ve been working really hard to get this ready. Please see the full announcement here.

As it’s lead developer I’m very much interested in getting feedback, bug reports and such. We run our ticket system in a redmine install at https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/ If you have any feedback, please register an account and let us know what you think.

If you’re running into any issue, reconfigure and recompile the engine with –enable-unittests and –enable-debug and send us the output of “suricata -u” this will run all the unittests (1191 currently). If everything is set up properly, they should all pass. If not, please start bugging us!

Happy new year everyone!

Available for contract work

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This year there will be a lot of work that needs to be done for the Open Infosec Foundation. And like I wrote a few days ago, a lot of work is already being done. However, most of it is unpaid at this time as it will be some months before our funding comes in. So at least until then I’m available and looking for contract work.

For the last two years I’ve been doing work as a contractor in the (open source) security field. My experience is mostly in coding in C and Perl, primarily on Snort and Snort_inline. Recently I created the (Perl language) SidReporter program for Emerging Threats. Areas I worked in: IPv6 IDS/IPS coding, signature writing, Web Application Firewalls, threading, bandwidth accounting, and more…

Checkout my LinkedIn profile for more info. My resume is available on request.

If you have some work or know someone that does, please let me know!

Looking forward to 2009: Open Infosec Foundation

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The year 2008 was an exciting year to me. The biggest thing going on the infosec side was the formation of the Open Infosec Foundation. We’ve been working on it behind the scenes for more than a year now, and it’s cool that we’ve finally announced our plans. Of course, the work is just getting started. Next year, we expect to finalize our foundation setup. We’re working with the Software Freedom Law Center for setting up the foundation charter and consortium rules. While the US government is funding us initially, we hope the consortium will guarantee our long term funding. We are talking to some interesting companies already, both big and small.

The last year I’ve been working on a prototype of the engine we’re building as well. It’s private for now as the foundation licensing terms & conditions haven’t been determined yet. I’m writing it mostly to learn. While I’ve been working as a developer on the Snort_inline project for a number of years already and as a contractor on several Snort related projects, I never learned so much about IDS/IPS technology as I’m doing now. The prototype may or may not be used (partly) for the engine once we got our feature list complete. We’ll see about that when the time is there. I plan to blog more about this codebase in the new year.

In 2008 we had our first brainstorming session, and to us it was very successful. In 2009 we’re hoping to do a few more. Stay tuned for the dates and places. I hope we can continue our feature discussions in the new year and give the foundation further shape. And don’t forget to suggest us a name for the engine… “OISF engine” just doesn’t sound cool enough! 😉

Open Infosec Foundation founded!

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Last week Matt Jonkman announced the formation of the Open Infosec Foundation. This foundation has been grant funded to create a new open source IDS/IPS engine. Together with Will Metcalf and of course Matt himself, I will be working on this. We want this to be a real community effort where there is a role for everyone in the infosec community. Developers, admins, vendors, goverments, research, education, everyone. There is a lot of work ahead, but that should be great fun and very inspiring. So far things are interesting already. The discussion mailinglist is growing rapidly with many ppl from the community and industry. A #oisf IRC channel was created today on freenode. Join us there to participate in discussion about this project!