Taming the beasts… aka suricata blueprint
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It's unfortunate that an open source project died (snort) but it's survival of the fittest. Now if we could only convince the (about) 43298 different open source text editors to die and merge in a single project, we will be colonizing Alpha Centauri by this time next year, and permission is hereby granted to quote me on that.Ha! Thats good stuff! ;D
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@jflsakfja:
I didnt know Suricata offered inline detection and blocking in Pfsense?
For what I know it works more or less the same way as Snort does (not inline)
Enlighten me pls :)
Why do I have to always write like I'm presenting a case to the court? Seems like even a miss-placed comma gets the author burned on the stake in these forums.
I have mentioned in the past that snort inline has been abandoned. Says so on their page if you don't believe me.
As it stands right now, the exact moment of this post, yes suricata and snort more or less run the same way on pfsense. BUT: The inline capability is there, it just cannot be used yet as pfsense needs some changes to it. They are coming soon(ish). Would you want to tear down your snort system when the changes are made, reconfigure and troubleshoot suricata, then enable it and forget it, or just log in and tick a checkbox and be done with it?
I don't see why we need to split the development effort between snort and suricata. Snort doesn't offer anything more than suricata, but offers plenty less than suricata. A couple years time down the road, the cisco announcement that snort will no longer be maintained as a community project should wake up everybody. And yes, the announcement WILL come. The same way the ebay announcement came when I was running around screaming "change your ebay passwords!!!" and everybody was looking at me puzzled.
It's unfortunate that an open source project died (snort) but it's survival of the fittest. Now if we could only convince the (about) 43298 different open source text editors to die and merge in a single project, we will be colonizing Alpha Centauri by this time next year, and permission is hereby granted to quote me on that.
I don't think Supermule meant to burn you, JFL ;D
I didn't interpret it as if you wrote that Suricata has inline currently, but I do have the background knowledge you provided earlier in this fine forum (Suricata doesn't have it now either, but giving pfSense going FreeBSD 10.0 it most likely will have - in the future). I could understand that Supermule thought you suggested otherwise.
But let's not fight and keep the FreeBSD spirit high in this great community :-*
I am a 100% behind you concerning the text in green, btw. Of course cisco will go that route. Of course.
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@Hollander:
A joy to read once again, JFL ;D
Armed with this knowledge, and the reply from BB right above about which Snort rules to disable (thanks again BB :P ) I reserved two hours to start disabling and enabling. Unfortunately, it seems Bill still didn't have time to make the enabling all and then disabling some-routine slightly more comfortable. He announced he will do that, so I will have to wait for that. Because the current way of working will require me to weeks of from work :-X
(1. Enable all -> 2. start to disable the exceptions -> 2a. disable first exception, it will not be disabled but will have the bright red cross -> wait for pfSense to process and respond back -> 2b. click the same cross once again & wait for pfSense to respond after which it will have the desired light yellow cross. That is not doable in a few hours with all the many rules I will have to manually disable).
Yeap, the change to the way rules are disabled makes sense for an already established and working system, but a new system that needs to be set up from the ground up is a nightmare to set up. That and you don't know when an ET rule "maintainer" will get the bright idea that he needs to fiddle with a no longer maintained rule, just for the hell of it, and your system starts blocking everybody because the rule was at its default off but the "maintainer" decided to flip it on.
The way I would like it:
- Enable all button
- Start clicking on rules I want to be disabled. These rules should be changed to user disabled (pale yellow).
- Move down the list
- Apply and wait.
- Move to next category and start at 1.
@Hollander and @Supermule
Oh, I didn't mean to sound hostile, it was a failed (as can be seen) attempt to humor :D. No hard feelings :) -
@jflsakfja:
Why do I have to always write like I'm presenting a case to the court?
That is the question you should answer, since this is entirely your choice.
@jflsakfja:
It's unfortunate that an open source project died (snort) but it's survival of the fittest.
Did it really die yet?
Last I checked, latest sources still available and there are active discussions in dev community…Being on the pessimistic side - yes, there is a chance Cisco will kill it, but I do not think this happened yet.
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That wasnt what I was saying…..
Pls. read my post again.
You speak as Suricata is better and it maybe is...but as of yet, it offers nothing over Snort regarding PFsense and protection...
Can we agree on that? ;)
@jflsakfja:
I didnt know Suricata offered inline detection and blocking in Pfsense?
For what I know it works more or less the same way as Snort does (not inline)
Enlighten me pls :)
Why do I have to always write like I'm presenting a case to the court? Seems like even a miss-placed comma gets the author burned on the stake in these forums.
I have mentioned in the past that snort inline has been abandoned. Says so on their page if you don't believe me.
As it stands right now, the exact moment of this post, yes suricata and snort more or less run the same way on pfsense. BUT: The inline capability is there, it just cannot be used yet as pfsense needs some changes to it. They are coming soon(ish). Would you want to tear down your snort system when the changes are made, reconfigure and troubleshoot suricata, then enable it and forget it, or just log in and tick a checkbox and be done with it?
I don't see why we need to split the development effort between snort and suricata. Snort doesn't offer anything more than suricata, but offers plenty less than suricata. A couple years time down the road, the cisco announcement that snort will no longer be maintained as a community project should wake up everybody. And yes, the announcement WILL come. The same way the ebay announcement came when I was running around screaming "change your ebay passwords!!!" and everybody was looking at me puzzled.
It's unfortunate that an open source project died (snort) but it's survival of the fittest. Now if we could only convince the (about) 43298 different open source text editors to die and merge in a single project, we will be colonizing Alpha Centauri by this time next year, and permission is hereby granted to quote me on that.
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Did it really die yet?
Last I checked, latest sources still available and there are active discussions in dev community…Being on the pessimistic side - yes, there is a chance Cisco will kill it, but I do not think this happened yet.
Ok, I'll bite.
An IDS isn't actually useful. It is useful when it's the only thing you have. An IPS on the other hand is immensely useful. Let's be clear on that one. Snort will NEVER have the inline capability that suricata has. Why? I don't know, but a hint as to why is that most (all?) inline maintainers for snort decided to kill the project and move on to suricata.
Seeing the latest source being available doesn't balance the 10 year outdated rules. Or the lack of fundamental understanding on how the Internet works, which is needed when writing a system to protect you on the Internet (for the love of god, if someone from the last dozen developers still reads this, please I'm down on my knees begging you, remove the "simple http" request rule. Please. There are millions of kids suffering because of it, billions of people starving because of it. I know that having an unknown guy tell you how to do your job is universally understood as THE most annoying thing, and you will resist all attempts to change the way you work, but it's THE most idiotic rule I've ever seen. Please I'm begging you remove it). 50 years later, come and re-read this post. If snort is still "maintained" you will see that the "simple http" request rule is still there. That's not how an alive project behaves.
Is ET better? HELL NO. Read the comments on the github list and you will too realize that even they have rules that should have long be deleted. For example doing a search on duckduckgo for "2010228 emerging" will show the 4th result with a title of "Global Causes of Death to 2020 – NEW YORK, Dec. 12, 2012 ...". See? I"m not crazy. This rule has been one of the leading causes for deaths worldwide. You know why? Because it identifies windows 7. Let's see, windows 7 RTM hit MSDN somewhere in the middle of 2009. So in 3 years time (result's title) more sysadmins have died to it than cancer, accidents, meteor stikes, COMBINED. When will rule maintainers realize that this is not a game, and people are actually getting killed because of their rules?
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That wasnt what I was saying…..
Pls. read my post again.
You speak as Suricata is better and it maybe is...but as of yet, it offers nothing over Snort regarding PFsense and protection...
Can we agree on that? ;)
Nope ;D
Right now it (suricata) offers a more efficient packet analysis (suricata's AC behaves like snort's AC-BNFA). Ability to keep running even if a rule has a typo. Detailed logs. And that's just the simple things. I'll not go "under the hood" sort of speak, because not everyone will notice the difference, and frankly nobody will use them :p
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If you all were happening to be in my neigborhood I would have invited you all in for some BBQ and some of the crappiest 'beer' you've ever drunk ('Heineken', one of the things many Dutch feel ashamed about. Freddie Heineken was a great marketeer but a lousy beer brewer). After which we would all be angry, and after which I would have grabbed in to my secret stash of serious beer - which comes from Belgium and goes by names such as 'Duvel', Westmalle Triple', and 'Kasteelbier'.
After which you all would be asking each other to marry each other, and the mission would be accomplished.
If you catch my drift ;D
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@jflsakfja:
Ok, I'll bite.
Don't.
@jflsakfja:
An IDS isn't actually useful. It is useful when it's the only thing you have. An IPS on the other hand is immensely useful. Let's be clear on that one. Snort will NEVER have the inline capability that suricata has. Why? I don't know, but a hint as to why is that most (all?) inline maintainers for snort decided to kill the project and move on to suricata.
We are talking about current situation with Snort/Suricata on pfSense - no inline for either :( so it does not make a big difference.
@jflsakfja:
Seeing the latest source being available doesn't balance the 10 year outdated rules.
…..........I don't know, but I do not really have any issues with current set of rules. They some thinking first, but then entire thing is pretty manageable, especially if you use predefined policy.
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@dgcom If you don't have a problem with the current rules you are either not using enough rules, or you followed my snort guide. Take it from the guy that broke the snort package by enabling too many rules (bmeeks can confirm this if you don't believe me). There is a picture I posted somewhere on these forums with the forum's banned hosts record. If I remember right, it was about 12.5K banned hosts. Most of that comes from custom rules, so (in a jokingly manner) I do know WTF I'm talking about ;)
If you don't want to use suricata, don't use it, I don't have any problem with that. One less installation to troubleshoot ;D
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I use those rules, which I think useful for me.
And I never said that I do not want to use Suricata. Once it has inline functionality in pfSense, I'll migrate.
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That was my point….
We need the inline functionality to work....
And it doesnt. Yet....
I use those rules, which I think useful for me.
And I never said that I do not want to use Suricata. Once it has inline functionality in pfSense, I'll migrate.
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I think having both Snort and Suricata around will promote a healthier environment. From what I have seen, I don't think that Cisco will close Snort to "closed Source", they may add new features that are only for Paid Subscribers or for their own Cisco Equipment.
While I think that ET and OISF are capable of the same behavior.
What we really need is a simpler way to manage the Rules. Enabling/Disabling one at a time is too cumbersome and leads to human error and is too taxing on Time (Which we all wish we had more of .. :) )
I hope the Devs listen and give us the right tools for the job so we can manage the IDS/IPS of our own Choosing in the most efficient way.
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What we really need is a simpler way to manage the Rules. Enabling/Disabling one at a time is too cumbersome and leads to human error and is too taxing on Time (Which we all wish we had more of .. :) )I agree. If there was a function or feature to show relationships between or how different rules affect others, that would be very useful and could possibly prevent human error. Especially for those less experienced or knowledgeable.
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I think having both Snort and Suricata around will promote a healthier environment. From what I have seen, I don't think that Cisco will close Snort to "closed Source", they may add new features that are only for Paid Subscribers or for their own Cisco Equipment.
While I think that ET and OISF are capable of the same behavior.
What we really need is a simpler way to manage the Rules. Enabling/Disabling one at a time is too cumbersome and leads to human error and is too taxing on Time (Which we all wish we had more of .. :) )
I hope the Devs listen and give us the right tools for the job so we can manage the IDS/IPS of our own Choosing in the most efficient way.
If the rule maintainers even said for once "yes, I've read that crazy guy's list", even for a single time, and corrected the rules I've been screaming about for years, then we wouldn't have all those rules to disable. An example? See the previous post about the win 6.1 rule. It's an invalid rule that must be deleted, end of story. If the rule maintainer doesn't delete it, I will figure out a way to work around that limitation by disabling the rule. I will not stop using the software just because a single person out of the thousands of persons that have to do with suricata doesn't realize he made a mistake.
Standing up to your actions and saying "I'm sorry, I made a mistake" is magnitudes of order more respectable than saying "I will not delete the rule because kids,cyber,terrorism,syria,russia,china,ukraine".Want an easier process to setting up suricata? Convince upstream to actually delete false positive rules. Not disable them, delete them. If they don't want to delete the win 6.1 rule, give microsoft a call, then put them on conference with the rule maintainer next to you and ask: "Is windows 7 actually windows 6.1?". Even after they hear the answer from microsoft they insist on not deleting the rule, a public name and shame is the industry accepted practice of dealing with it. Bonus points if you get it on video. Until then, I'm personally happy with maintaining my own false positives list and manually disabling the rules. Yes the disabling process as mentioned earlier should be changed, but it sort of works for now. Even if nobody else maintains the rules, I have my own rules for suricata to do what I want it to do.
A huge thanks to bmeeks (and all others that helped in the past) for getting snort/suricata packages were they are. I'm not playing down any of that work, if they didn't make the packages, we wouldn't be here arguing today on what rules and how we should disable them. Think about it. When IDS/IPS systems first started getting imagined (not created, imagined) they came with a price of a few million $. Now it's just a click and follow the guide away.
This is where the economics comes in (Hollander will be thrilled :P): If there is a single user of your software, don't expect much in the sense of support from it (donations/subscriptions). If everybody out there is using your software, and you are not a greedy SoB and actually charge a logical price for your software (eg subscriptions), a whole lot of people will chime in to support you. Yes this is the ideal scenario, and no it's not what actually happens in reality. It should happen though, because it's a shame to see projects die because of lack of user support. No sympathy to openssl. As Linus would have said:"The sooner the developers die in a horrific car accident, the better". Not my words, and put the phone down, it's not a "terrorist threat".
There is a (not so) fine line between fixing bugs and ignoring feature requests, and implementing feature requests but ignoring bugs. OpenSSL went over that line years ago.
If you see a man running around waving his arms up high, screaming "CHARGE FOR SOFTWARE????ARE YOU F***ING INSANE???SOFTWARE SHOULD ALWAYS BE FREE", it's RMS, please ignore him. His words have no relation to reality (no pun intended).
Theoretically speaking now, don't want to offend anyone, but I'll go ahead and do so anyway: If a certain IDS/IPS offers me all I want, then I'll contribute to its creation (documentation,donations,beer for the developers, hookers and blow (let's see how many got that joke) and so on). If said IDS/IPS's rule maintainer doesn't listen to me when I say a certain rule is buggy and must be corrected, don't expect said maintainer to get any support from me. Just saying, don't want to offend anyone.
And yes, I've put my money where my mouth is, remember the donations for snort's sync to slave system. It was a feature I wanted badly, the package maintainer impemented it without any noticable side effects to the general usage, and I've donated to those that made it happen. Everybody should do the same and stop sucking on RMS's meme that software should always be free and developers must die of hunger.
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My vision for both Suricata and Snort includes a true inline operation option. For that to happen we need some changes to the pfSense kernel code. I think those will come, but it will take a little while. Obviously changes down at that level should not just be rushed out. So please continue to have patience.
As for some improvements that can actually happen without pfSense kernel changes, here are some highlights from my internal road map of new features I have planned for each package.
Suricata:
Migration to the new 2.0.2 binary code. This offers several new detection/inspection features, especially around DNS requests. There are also a multitude of other changes and improvements compared to the existing 1.4.6 binary code base in the current package.Adding the same XMLRPC sync feature to Suricata that currently exists in Snort so you can synchronize Suricata setups across multiple firewalls.
Fixing the list of bugs you guys have submitted over the last few months. There are several of them.
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Snort:
Adding support for some of the new file capture features that have been added to the Snort binary. These mimic in large part what Suricata does in this area.Both Suricata and Snort:
Backporting significant functionality changes between Snort and Suricata. This means reverting to the old force rule enable/disable icon behavior that some folks so desperately want (I'm looking at you jflsakfja… ;))Adding a filter option to the ALERTS tab so you can see only what you want. This will be modeled after the firewall log filter functionality.
Providing rule management functionality equivalent to PulledPork with regex matches for enabling or disabling rules. In other words, the ability to read and interpret enablesid.conf, modifysid.conf and disablesid.conf files. You would be able to edit these offline and upload to the firewall, or edit in place using the same interface as I implemented for the IP REP lists management tab in Snort.
Bill
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Hi Bill,
This is Fantastic News. Lots to look forward to. We are all deeply in your debt! ;)
We've never had a poll for the Best Package Maintainer! But I think we should start…
If you need any help to Test, I am sure several of us will throw our hats into the ring.
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Just wondering…
Would it be feasible/easy/doable to implement squid like behavior in Suricata/Snort to make it independant of the inline capabilities of Pfsense?
Instead of Snort inspecting copies of packets, then going through as a transparent proxy, then the inline could be there?
Doable?
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My vision for both Suricata and Snort includes a true inline operation option. For that to happen we need some changes to the pfSense kernel code. I think those will come, but it will take a little while. Obviously changes down at that level should not just be rushed out. So please continue to have patience.
As for some improvements that can actually happen without pfSense kernel changes, here are some highlights from my internal road map of new features I have planned for each package.
Suricata:
Migration to the new 2.0.2 binary code. This offers several new detection/inspection features, especially around DNS requests. There are also a multitude of other changes and improvements compared to the existing 1.4.6 binary code base in the current package.Adding the same XMLRPC sync feature to Suricata that currently exists in Snort so you can synchronize Suricata setups across multiple firewalls.
Fixing the list of bugs you guys have submitted over the last few months. There are several of them.
–---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Snort:
Adding support for some of the new file capture features that have been added to the Snort binary. These mimic in large part what Suricata does in this area.Both Suricata and Snort:
Backporting significant functionality changes between Snort and Suricata. This means reverting to the old force rule enable/disable icon behavior that some folks so desperately want (I'm looking at you jflsakfja… ;))Adding a filter option to the ALERTS tab so you can see only what you want. This will be modeled after the firewall log filter functionality.
Providing rule management functionality equivalent to PulledPork with regex matches for enabling or disabling rules. In other words, the ability to read and interpret enablesid.conf, modifysid.conf and disablesid.conf files. You would be able to edit these offline and upload to the firewall, or edit in place using the same interface as I implemented for the IP REP lists management tab in Snort.
Bill
If The Company was hiring, you would be one of the first people it would hire, trust me on that one ;D
Many thanks for helping the community with those packages. I'm sure as the features everybody wants are added we can all chime in to make it worth a bit for the time you've spent on them.
WRT the blue text, maybe we should agree on a bare minimum of disabled rules (the absolute lowest number of general use rules) that should be disabled on all installations and somehow integrate that into newer installs? So people don't have to get choked into configuring snort/suricata right away after install, but actually get on the internet and get some help if they have a problem, without the IDS/IPS banning everything (coughsimple http requestcough).
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@jflsakfja:
WRT the blue text, maybe we should agree on a bare minimum of disabled rules (the absolute lowest number of general use rules) that should be disabled on all installations and somehow integrate that into newer installs? So people don't have to get choked into configuring snort/suricata right away after install, but actually get on the internet and get some help if they have a problem, without the IDS/IPS banning everything (coughsimple http requestcough).
Not a bad idea. When I get to that point, I will be in touch. That could be offered as an option with the default being "yes" (meaning, auto-disable some bare minimum of community-agreed upon quasi-useless rules).
Bill
