Can/is Snort using JA3 hashes?
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Hi,
as I don't seem to be able to find a specific answer to that question, I thought in getting it out here. I read about Surricata being able to utilize JA3 hashes but can't find anything about Snort using it or if Snort is able to detect specific JA3 hashes at all.
Background: Customer explicitly asked if Snort could detect a specific JA3 hash and look for that in the logs. As I never had such a specific inquiry: are they utilized (at all)? And if so, can one look after a specific one with some sort of custom rule/filter/anything?
Thanks! and cheers,
\jens -
So far as I know, Snort does not currently support JA3 hashes. I do recall that feature being recently added to Suricata, though. Implementing that support in Snort would require making changes to the binary itself. I don't believe it's something you can do with a rule. The Suricata binary has specific coding to support JA3 hashing.
If JA3 support is critical to your customer, perhaps Suricata might be a better fit for them ???
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@bmeeks said in Can/is Snort using JA3 hashes?:
If JA3 support is critical to your customer, perhaps Suricata might be a better fit for them ???
That was the answer I was looking for. As Surricata didn't have (or still don't?) support for OpenAppID rules we set up Snort at the time in the past as the Netgate blog about support for OpenAppID was posted. The request about JA3 popped out of nowhere a few days ago so if that's something they absolutely want - then yes, we'd have to switch. Would take time though to test it out first, roll out on the cluster and train the team using it that is currently struggling coming to terms with Snort.
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@JeGr said in Can/is Snort using JA3 hashes?:
OpenAppID
Never hearing JA3 before, interesting.
If you find a way to user OpenAppID and Suricata I'm also interested. -
@slu said in Can/is Snort using JA3 hashes?:
@JeGr said in Can/is Snort using JA3 hashes?:
OpenAppID
Never hearing JA3 before, interesting.
If you find a way to user OpenAppID and Suricata I'm also interested.OpenAppID is a former Cisco proprietary product that they released to open source, and then their Talos partner (the group that handles Snort development) integrated it into Snort.
You could try posting a Feature Request over on the Suricata Redmine site here: https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/projects/suricata.
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@JeGr said in Can/is Snort using JA3 hashes?:
@bmeeks said in Can/is Snort using JA3 hashes?:
If JA3 support is critical to your customer, perhaps Suricata might be a better fit for them ???
That was the answer I was looking for. As Surricata didn't have (or still don't?) support for OpenAppID rules we set up Snort at the time in the past as the Netgate blog about support for OpenAppID was posted. The request about JA3 popped out of nowhere a few days ago so if that's something they absolutely want - then yes, we'd have to switch. Would take time though to test it out first, roll out on the cluster and train the team using it that is currently struggling coming to terms with Snort.
There are other options depending on their requirements. For instance, if they simply wanted to monitor/alert on JA3 hashes and not block, they could install Suricata on a separate machine (bare metal or VM) and connect it to a SPAN port on a managed switch.
If you don't have both packages blocking in Legacy Blocking Mode, and you have the CPU horsepower and RAM, it is certainly possible to run both packages on the same pfSense instance. In that case you would run Suricata with a very stripped-down rule set concentrating solely on the JA3 hashing stuff. So in a setup like this you might configure Snort to use Inline IPS Mode (assuming your NIC hardware supports it) and Suricata to use Legacy Blocking. Or you could flip that scenario. The only caveat here is that you can't run Inline Mode and Legacy Blocking Mode on the same physical interface. So you would need to monitor the traffic on another matching interface. For example, Suricata JA3 on WAN and Snort OpenAppID on LAN (or vice versa). You could always run one in alert-only mode and the other package in blocking mode.
Functionally within the GUI, both packages are very, very similar. In fact, the majority of the Suricata PHP code is a copy-and-paste from the Snort GUI code. So the look and feel is the same.