January 4th, 2010
If you’re running into issues with Suricata, it may be worth spending some time looking at the debugging options.
To enable the debugging code, pass “–enable-debug” to configure.
./configure –enable-debug
And make & make install again. Make sure that during compilation you see -DDEBUG in the gcc commands.
Then to really enable it at runtime, pass the SC_LOG_LEVEL
SC_LOG_LEVEL=Debug
Depending on how you run the engine, this will output massive amounts of debugging info. Thats why we added a pcre regex filter option.
SC_LOG_OP_FILTER=regex
The regex currently is case sensitive. It will be matched against the full debug line. For example if you want to want to see only output related to the HTP module do something like:
SC_LOG_LEVEL=Debug SC_LOG_OP_FILTER=”htp” suricata -c suricata.yaml -r /path/to/file.pcap
Or maybe you want the stream messages as well:
SC_LOG_LEVEL=Debug SC_LOG_OP_FILTER=”(htp|stream)” suricata -c suricata.yaml -r /path/to/file.pcap
You can also control the logging format by passing the SC_LOG_FORMAT environment variable. By default it’s set to “[%i] %t – (%f:%l) <%d> (%n) — “.
The following format specifiers are available:
t timestamp
p process id (pid)
i thread id
m thread module name
d log level
f filename
l line number
n function name
Example:
SC_LOG_FORMAT=”[%i] %t – (%f:%l) <%d> (%n) — “
Putting it all together:
SC_LOG_LEVEL=Debug SC_LOG_FORMAT=”[%i] %t – (%f:%l) <%d> (%n) — ” SC_LOG_OP_FILTER=”(htp|stream)” suricata -c suricata.yaml -r /path/to/file.pcap
If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know!
Tags: debug, oisf, Suricata
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December 31st, 2009
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!
Tags: ids, IPS, oisf, Suricata
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December 30th, 2009
Things here at OISF are crazy busy since we’re wrapping up our first version of the engine. Tomorrow there will be a first release! Stay tuned!
Tags: oisf, Suricata
Posted in Suricata, oisf | 1 Comment »
November 3rd, 2009
Daniele Sluijters has spend quite an effort at creating Vuurmuur rpms for Fedora 11 and CentOS 5, both 32 bit and 64 bit. The packages are available at the Vuurmuur ftp-server here: ftp://ftp.vuurmuur.org/releases/0.7/contrib/ Currently we have packages for 0.7, hopefully 0.8beta2 will follow later. Thanks Daniele!
Tags: rpm, Vuurmuur
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November 1st, 2009
Ever since I’ve been working on the OISF engine I’ve been unable to spend much time on my Vuurmuur project. Luckily it seems development is picking up some speed again because there are some (new) people working on some improvements. Two development branches have been started in svn. The first is “nflog” which is meant for the development of support for libnetfilter_log to replace the current syslog based vuurmuur_log.
The second is called “ipv6″ and is meant for adding IPv6 support to Vuurmuur as a frontend to ip6tables. This is going to be quite an effort, but I’m excited that it got started!
Anyone interested in joining the development effort is welcome to do so. Join us at #vuurmuur on freenode.
On a side note, last week I released Vuurmuur 0.8 beta 2, exactly 6 months after beta 1. I’ll try to do the next release a little sooner!
Tags: IPv6, Vuurmuur
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October 31st, 2009
Today I installed a Qemu virtual machine with the ARM architecture. I think ARM is becoming an interesting architecture as smartphones and many home routers use it. I was interested in seeing if our OISF engine would compile and run properly on it. So far it seems really well. Compilation was without issue, all our current 800+ unittests ran successfully and it seems to run just fine so far. Too bad the virtual machine is so slow though…
Also, since a few weeks I have a Android based smartphone. Since it runs Linux and uses an ARM CPU I think/hope it should be able to run the engine. I hope to find some time soon to look into Android development for this…
Tags: android, arm, oisf, qemu
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September 30th, 2009
Another quick update on the development of the OISF engine. Overall development is going great. Basics like signature keywords, stream reassembly, ip defragmentation are nearing completion. Unified1 + barnyard was already working for quite some time, but now we also have unified2 compatible output. I’ve tested this to work with barnyard2 and Sguil which works nicely.
We have the first versions of our new YAML based configuration format checked in, a brand new logging API, midstream pickup support in our Stream engine, native PFRING support and many other additions.
Next up in development is IP reputation support in the engine, support for advanced vars and more L7 modules.
The IP reputation is one of the things we have high expectation about. In working group discussions we defined 16 categories for which to keep reputation, for example: spammer, cnc, p2p, etc. We’re currently designing the datatypes for holding as much of this info in memory as possible.
The advanced vars is the idea of applying ModSecurity’s var collections to our engine. They will be like Snort’s flowbits, but then more advanced. At least 2 more types will be supported: integers and raw buffers. Integers should enable signatures to modify counters, but also compare various counters with each other.
In the L7 modules development we’re putting a big focus on HTTP (more on that later). We’re also currently working on a DCE/RPC decoder. For this work we hired Kirby Kuehl from Breaking Point. The L7 framework I’m still working on should make development of modules for new protocols fairly straightforward.
We expect to announce the name and mascot of our engine soon. Also our bylaws should also finally been done almost now, just as the consortium license. Once thats all into place, we expect to open up our code to the public quite soon. Exciting times!
Tags: engine, ModSecurity, oisf, pfring, Sguil, yaml
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August 16th, 2009
The last month has been crazy busy. Development of the engine is progressing nicely. My own role has been assigning tasks to our coders, guiding them, reviewing their work, integrating it and of course write code. We currently have nine people coding, not all full time though, and are still looking for more coders.
Progress has been made on a number of things: we have many more decoders, threading updates, a stats subsystem, stream tracking and reassembly, a L7 protocol parser framework and many more unittests. We’re working on OpenCL hardware accelaration, although we’re running into driver issues, so that may take some time before it’s usable.
On the QA side Will Metcalf is busy setting up an automated test rig, doing daily tests runs of our unittests on various platforms and with different compiler settings and such. When that is done pcap based tests and live traffic testing is next.
We have set up a number of “working group” mailinglists that discuss different subjects such as a configuration language and a rule language. Most are still ongoing, however the configuration language discussion seems to have come to a conclusion.
For the configuration language the discussion has settled on using YAML, a structured but still nicely editable format. It has many language bindings, so I hope management tools will be built for it later.
Other discussions, such as about the ip reputation, are still ongoing. You are very welcome to share your ideas with the group.
Like stated above, we’re still looking for coders. If you are a C coder and you’re interested in working with and for us, send us your resume!
Tags: engine, oisf, william metcalf, yaml
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July 21st, 2009
So I just got back from Washington D.C. where we had our first public meeting for the OISF. I think it went very well as there were more people than expected. The attendees came from all parts from the industry & government. Overall reception was very positive and we’ve gotten many offers for help in development & testing.
Around the public meetings we had private meetings with a number of companies and I’m very happy that three of them commited to the project already:
Endace the New Zealand based hardware acceleration company was first to commit. They are providing us with hardware and time from their coders. Naturally they will be interested in getting our code to perform as good as possible on their hardware, but they have offered to assist in the general development of the engine as well.
Breach Security is supporting us too. They are providing us with coding time of Brian Rectanus, the current developer and maintainer of ModSecurity. Given my enthusiasm about ModSecurity, no one will be surprised that I’m really excited to having Brian and Breach involved. Naturally, they are going to help us make sure our engine excels at HTTP security. More on that in a later post.
Last (for now), we’re getting support from Nitro Security. Having worked with Nitro in the past I’m really excited about this as well, especially as Nitro has an IPS interest. Of course inliniac cares a lot about IPS! 
The form of Nitro’s support is still to be determined, but it’ll likely be in the form of time from their coders.
At this point, contributions like this (coding support, QA hardware) is what we are interested in most. We’re talking to a number of other companies for setting similar partnerships. We’ll announce them as soon as we know more.
On a last note, I’d like to thank Frank Knobbe, Daniel Peck and Richard Bejtlich for attending the meeting. It was great finally meeting you guys in person and thanks for your great input. Same goes for the other people that were there, thanks a lot for coming!
We will be publishing our meeting notes soon. Stay tuned!
Tags: breach security, endace, ModSecurity, nitro security, oisf
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