Taming the beasts… aka suricata blueprint

A Former User

whitelists were renamed to passlists not long ago. That is a definite bug in the suricata package. please post a link pointing to that post, on the most recent version(ed?) topic on suricata or re-post the same thing there. I'm not the suricata package maintainer, bmeeks is ;D

bmeeks got a tunnel working a few days back, so IPv6 support for both packages should improve.

Cino

@jflsakfja:

I also dual stack, but have not seen that alert yet. Same here, I get better speeds over the tunnel, than the native IPv4.

On a side note, I'm updating the list. Mostly cleaning it up, moving the DO NOT USE! categories to the top so it's easier to find them, removing the # and no # rules…a line added here, a line taken away there...deleting some rules, updating the counts. I said I'm rarely mistaken (mathematically proven by the world's top universities, and the possibility of me being mistaken comes out to 0.000000000001%) but ffs guys. 5 rules on top of a count that says 4 rules are disabled should be noticed by someone by now :D.

EDIT: Finished cleaning up. The list is now starting fresh for suricata (old rules coming over from snort that did not FP within a reasonable timeframe were removed), cleaned up and ready to go. Enjoy!

You're dual stack and using a Tunnel? When I mean dual stack; I mean receiving IPv4 IPv6 addresses on the same WAN interface.. The alerts are on that interface… Once I get my stuff fine tune, i'm going to copy it over to LAN and see if there is a difference. I should had started with my LAN interface first but oh well...

I noticed the counts were wrong, figured your eyes were getting crossed or something from the long post :o Thanks again for a great thread!

@avink use this topic https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=73906.msg428032#msg428032 to report the issue

A Former User

Statistics on suricata's system usage

While idling, the system is using about 2% CPU and 23% RAM (4GB,32bit so not all available).

Under normal load (not extreme "ZOMG! multiple 10Gbps duplex laser links into space!") the CPU occasionally spikes to <10% for a brief moment, and the RAM stays about the same.

While reloading rules (when hitting save on the rules page or disabling a rule from the alerts tab) the CPU spikes to 50% with it occasionally going higher (seen up to 92% for a few seconds). CPU is a dual core, so 50% means 100% of one core. RAM usage drops at the start of the reload, and continues to slowly climb to ~23% while the rules are reloaded into RAM.

System has been set up according to this topic, with about 50 custom rules. It's the network gateway to a small datacenter, which also provides Internet connectivity for hosts outside the datacenter.

Matcher is AC, suricata interface is WAN.

@Cino : Having a tunnel means somehow getting the IPv6 addresses onto pfsense. Unless you are doing some pretty complicated stuff (routing packets to Mars, then Venus, then the end of the galaxy :D) all other interfaces that need to use those addresses (except the tunnel's "terminating" WAN interface) ARE dual stacked ;). Clients on the LAN side can connect either using an IPv4 address or completely stop using IPv4 and use an IPv6 address. That is the definition of dual stacked :D

dotOne

@Cino, Thanks. I removed my message from this thread.

Cino

@jflsakfja:

@Cino : Having a tunnel means somehow getting the IPv6 addresses onto pfsense. Unless you are doing some pretty complicated stuff (routing packets to Mars, then Venus, then the end of the galaxy :D) all other interfaces that need to use those addresses (except the tunnel's "terminating" WAN interface) ARE dual stacked ;). Clients on the LAN side can connect either using an IPv4 address or completely stop using IPv4 and use an IPv6 address. That is the definition of dual stacked :D

Maybe I don't understand but then again I think I do ;) My WAN has both an IPv4 and a IPv6 address, and so does my LAN/Clients.. Before my ISP provided native IPv6; the WAN was IPv4 and I had a separate WAN(Tunneled) Interface for IPv6. That being said, my current WAN/LAN/Clients are all dual stacked. When I only had IPv6 via a tunnel, the LAN and Clients were dual stacked while my WANs were not. Does that make sense?

Question: With a IPv6 Tunnel setup, do you run suricata on that interface also? Or just the IPv4 WAN Interface?

Edit: Noticed emerging-rbn-malvertisers.rules emerging-rbn.rules were not in the DO NOT USE list

A Former User

They were supposed to remove those categories since they are no longer maintained. I'll add them in the do not use.

Yes that's what I meant with dual stack.

No need to run suricata on the IPv6 tunnel. It still alerts as is.

Cino

@jflsakfja:

They were supposed to remove those categories since they are no longer maintained. I'll add them in the do not use.

Do you think they will? after reading the comments in your enable rule list; hell will have to freeze over…

A Former User

Supposed is the key word :D

ToxIcon

Thank you for taking the time to write up and
giving us this great suricata blueprint,

maybe you can help me with this setup

I would like to put pfsense in front of an
existing firewall, but just as an
Suricata IDS and also use the IP Reputation Manager script
is this possible, if it is how would i go about doing
so. The system that i am using has 3 ports, 1 port will be for managing
pfs as a Suricata IDS and the other 2 ports 1 will be connected to the wan of the other firewall
and the other port would be connect to the isp modem.

I would like the modem to not see the pfsense Suricata IDS box to act like its not even their and still pass the external address to the
other firewall behind the pfsense Suricata IDS while the pfsense Suricata IDS is still catching the nasty stuff and blocking them.

bmeeks

@Cino:

great work jflsakfja!

You may want to add decoder-events - 2200013 IPv6 truncated packet to the list for noise. My alert file is mostly this alert. What is strange, none of these show up in the GUI, only in the Alert file itself… Because there is no IP, i'm thinking the GUI doesn't display it. But that's for another thread after I confirm my findings.


06/25/2014-06:27:46.251740  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 01 EA 40 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.250371  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 01 EA 40 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.318718  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 01 EA 40 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.251489  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 01 EA 40 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.319106  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 01 EA 40 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.319352  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 01 EA 40 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.543947  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 0A B8 B0 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.319496  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 01 EA 40 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.543837  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 0A B8 B0 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.986163  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 05 E7 64 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]
06/25/2014-06:27:46.986289  [**] [1:2200013:1] SURICATA IPv6 truncated packet [**] [Classification: (null)] [Priority: 3] [**] [Raw pkt: 00 25 90 02 31 65 00 01 5C 33 54 41 86 DD 60 05 E7 64 05 B4 06 34 26 10 01 60 00 11 00 11 00 00 ]

The GUI is not currently showing these alerts because it is not properly detecting them. The Suricata alert log output is modified to produce a CSV (comma separated values) format. There is a built-in PHP function that can parse a CSV file and split the result into fields. For now the pfSense PHP code is counting fields and only showing on the ALERTS tab those alerts that parse into 13 (I think it is 13) fields. The decoder events currently don't output 13 distinct fields, and hence are dropped by the ALERTS tab PHP code.

I can fix that in an upcoming update.

Bill

bmeeks

@jflsakfja:

whitelists were renamed to passlists not long ago. That is a definite bug in the suricata package. please post a link pointing to that post, on the most recent version(ed?) topic on suricata or re-post the same thing there. I'm not the suricata package maintainer, bmeeks is ;D

bmeeks got a tunnel working a few days back, so IPv6 support for both packages should improve.

I do finally have a working IPv6 tunnel, and I did see the bug report in a separate post and responded. I will fix it.

Bill

A Former User

@Arist:

Thank you for taking the time to write up and
giving us this great suricata blueprint,

maybe you can help me with this setup

I would like to put pfsense in front of an
existing firewall, but just as an
Suricata IDS and also use the IP Reputation Manager script
is this possible, if it is how would i go about doing
so. The system that i am using has 3 ports, 1 port will be for managing
pfs as a Suricata IDS and the other 2 ports 1 will be connected to the wan of the other firewall
and the other port would be connect to the isp modem.

I would like the modem to not see the pfsense Suricata IDS box to act like its not even their and still pass the external address to the
other firewall behind the pfsense Suricata IDS while the pfsense Suricata IDS is still catching the nasty stuff and blocking them.

What you are looking for is running pfsense (+suricata) as a transparent bridge in front of the "normal" firewall. Suricata might have trouble deciding its home net values if running as a bridge (snort did) but that's easily corrected by manually entering the home net.

A transparent bridge is not visible on the network. If you send a packet to one interface, and the rules allow it, it will pop up through the other interface. You can actually do some pretty clever stuff with it, provided you are using a single host (no CARP). Think of it as merging the two interfaces into a single interface, with filtering applied.

A couple of years back I was able to access a public server hosted behind a transparent bridge, from a host on a NATed interface on that transparent bridge (let's say the admin interface), using the server's public IP (universally understood as NOT possible to do). Then again I'm the only person on the planet that managed to get IPv6 working through 30 year old switches :)

That said, my personal recommendation is NOT to run pfsense like that. If you are trying to protect a small network, put pfsense directly as the core router (which allows you to move onto CARP if you so wish), which also saves time (money) + space (1 pc instead of 2 daisy chained firewalls) + power. Then set up firewalls on network hosts, along with other security measures (brute force protection for example) working together to protect your hosts.

EDIT: Clarification: I'm not saying don't ever use transparent bridges. If all you need is a single firewall host, it's actually better to run it as a transparent bridge since the host is not visible from the network. Depending on law mandated paranoia (called certifications in the industry), that might actually be exactly what you should use.
There are also downsides, an example is that the firewall hosts themselves don't have internet access (cannot check for updates), as set up in a plain vanilla transparent bridge (permission is hereby granted to correct me if I'm wrong).

justsomeone

Awesome post, thanks!

I'm trying to install pfiprep, and am getting an error when installing one of the dependencies.

$ pkg_add -r grepcidr
tar: Failed to set default locale

Can someone please tell me what to do to fix this?

BBcan177

@justsomeone:

$ pkg_add -r grepcidr
tar: Failed to set default locale

First, I would recommend that you make a Full Backup Diagnostics:Backup/Restore (Backup Area "all") and Download configuration… :)

I haven't come across this error on any of my installs or with the ones that I have helped to get working.

What version of pfSense are you using? Is it a Full Install or a Nano version?

Are you seeing any other errors? Could you post the full output of that command?

Can you download the file manually? Maybe a Firewall Rule or Snort is blocking it?

Try to [ [b]ping ftp.freebsd.org ] and see if you get a reply?

[ [b]fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-8.3-release/Latest/grepcidr.tbz ]
(This path is for the amd64 Release)

[ [b]pkg_add grepcidr.tbz ]

foetus

My cron job is throwing errors.
Since manually running "/usr/bin/nice -n20 /home/badips/pfiprep >> /home/badips/download.log 2>&1" gives me an error "Ambiguous output redirect." .
Leaving out the log output redirect it works fine. (aka >> … or > ...) So I could just remove the log output, but I'd rather keep it. :)

For the rest, perfect.
I edited the main script to leave out some lists, and also moved to using the main IR_ lists.
Also great work on the widget.

Cino

@foetus:

My cron job is throwing errors.
Since manually running "/usr/bin/nice -n20 /home/badips/pfiprep >> /home/badips/download.log 2>&1" gives me an error "Ambiguous output redirect." .
Leaving out the log output redirect it works fine. (aka >> … or > ...) So I could just remove the log output, but I'd rather keep it. :)

for the cron job "/usr/bin/nice -n20 /home/badips/pfiprep >> /home/badips/download.log 2>&1" works for me, but if i run it via directly from the shell, I get the same error you're seeing

running from the shell, i type "/usr/bin/nice -n20 /home/badips/pfiprep >> /home/badips/download.log" instead

foetus

Hmm, I'll just let the cron job do its job and see if it throws an error then.
Thx for that.

BBcan177

Hi Foetus,

Welcome Aboard!

Be careful not to run the command from the shell when Cron is scheduled to run or there may be some unexpected behavior. I added some code to avoid having them collide but just be aware to only run the [ [b]./iprep ] command when CRON is not scheduled to run or is still in process.

You can just run [ [b]./pfiprep ] from the shell and scroll up to see the output. You can also look at the "Daily.log" which shows a summary of the Downloads. Look out for any "FAIL" downloads.

The High Level function of the script:

Download Individual List
Extract IPs
Save copy to /orig Folder
Check for Ranges that have 255 IPs and mark a single /24 Range
Process /24 (Which looks for repeat Offenders in a /24 Range) (max variable) Individual Blocklist Only.
Duplication Check

Once all of the Downloads are completed that were scheduled to run:

The Following is performed Globally on ALL Lists, except for the ones that were marked as "p24=no" on the Collect Line.

p-Deduplication - Looks for Repeat Offenders that are over the pmax variable regardless of Country Code.

d-DeDuplication - Looks for Repeat Offenders that are over the dmax variable but uses the Country Code Whitelist function.

If the Sanity Checks passes, it will create the TIER (Group) lists and perform the "pfctl" commands to update the pfSense Alias Tables.

If you decide to remove a list, you need to add "remove" after the collect line. When the script runs at its next scheduled run, it will remove the list from the database properly. Don't try to do this manually.

If you follow the High level steps, when you use the p24 process in d-deduplicaton, it will look for a repeat range of malicious IPs and find all of the Blocklists that have this IP listed.

The FIRST blocklists get a single x.x.x.0/24 Block and all of the other Lists that have the range are deleted.

So if a List is removed, and it happens to be a list that had the p24 process and was the first list processed as above, then you have no Blocklists for that range. This will correct itself on when the Lists are re-downloaded but that could be 1-4hrs depending on when the Lists are scheduled to run.

To get back into Sync, you can run this function:

[ [b]./pfiprep killdb ]

Which will wipe the Database (Settings are not touched) and it will resync the database.

Out of Curiosity, which Lists did you disable?

Another Function is to use the "IR_Match" Alias in the Floating Rules as a "Match" Rule. This will show you activity for the IP Ranges that passed the Country Code Whitelist process. Because its a "Match" rule, it will not block, but just log the activity.

Since I have been running the script, I have not found too many False Positives, but I always recommend not to disable a list but to create a "SAFE Alias" Rule that is defined above the "Block/Reject" Rules. And just add the IPs that you want to allow.

The Patch for diag_dns.php will also work when looking at the Snort/Suricata Alert Logs.

If you are running Snort/Suricata, when you click on the "!" ICON to Resolve an IP, you will find that most of the IPs are already listed in the BlockLists. You will also see over time that it will pickup an Alert for an IP but the Blocklists do not have the specific IP but there are several IPs within the same Range that are being Blocked.

Also in diag_dns.php, there are several IP Reputation Links that can help you determine the Reputation of any Blocked IP before you remove a list, or Add an IP to the SAFE Alias list.

Let me know if you need any clarification or any other help.

A Former User

The 2>&1 at the end means don't bother emailing me everytime you run this job. It doesn't make any sense running that from the console, since the system wasn't intending to email you anyway.

foetus

@justsomeone:

Awesome post, thanks!

I'm trying to install pfiprep, and am getting an error when installing one of the dependencies.
$ pkg_add -r grepcidr
tar: Failed to set default locale
Can someone please tell me what to do to fix this?

Dont run the command from Diagnostics -> Command.
Run it from SSH console (shell) or direct console (shell) and it should work.