At this point I really don’t care much. What the Suricata development by the OISF has shown in my opinion is that we’ve managed to create a very promising new Open Source project out here. In little over a year, funded for about $600k by the US government and with heavy (and growing) industry support, we’ve produced a new IDS/IPS engine mostly compatible with Snort but build on a all new code base an incorporating some very interesting fresh ideas. We’re already seeing a community form around our project with a lot of support from that new community.

So about this performance fuzz. Who to believe? Is Suricata faster than Snort? Yes, no, ehhh, depends on how you look at it. Is Suricata faster than Snort on a single core cycle for cycle, tick for tick? No. It’s pretty clear we aren’t, I didn’t expect us to be either. But we scale. We’ve had reports of running on a 32 core box and scaling to use all cores. There Suricata is much faster. Like Martin Roesch wrote on the VRT blog one can set up Snort on a box to one have instance of Snort per core (or multiple per core). This is in fact the way many appliance builders get to high speeds with it. While this may be feasible for appliance builders, admins we talked to that run their own IDS/IPS think it’s a management nightmare.

As we’re a new project with a fresh codebase, there is going to be a lot of low hanging fruit in performance optimizations. I’ll give an example here. On a test pcap, with a reduced ruleset (about 10k rules), Suricata took about 400s to inspect. Then with a bigger ruleset (about 14k rules), it suddenly took 1600s! After a little bit of cache profiling it turned out that the part of the engine where the address part of a signature was inspected was horribly cache inefficient. In less than an afternoon I rewrote it to be more efficient. Result, the same test now completes in under 600s. This code is in the current git master and will be in 1.0.1.

My point here being that there will be lots of room for optimizations, and not just minor stuff. So far we’ve mostly focused on being accurate (we still have work to do here) and having the algorithms be correct. Hardly any tuning has been done. In our last OISF meeting we’ve gotten a few very interesting help offers for serious performance testing and tuning on some really big boxes, state of the art CUDA hardware, 10GBit labs, etc. So I expect a lot of progress in the months to follow.

It’s clear that we have work to do. What I’m really excited about is how fast that work is progressing, how much help we’re getting both from our brand new community and the industry, and the openness of our development process.

On a final note, during the development of this project we’ve found a lot of bugs and issues in other tools. Will Metcalf, who runs our QA, has been reporting many issues in Snort and VRT sigs to Sourcefire, in Emerging Threats sigs to the ET community. We’ve found bugs in other tools as well, for example in a neat library called libcap-ng. So everyone benefits from our work!

The code analysis is pretty nice: it gives statistics on code base size, growth, comment ratio, languages used, etc. Per developer it tracks quite a few stats as well.

It also does a estimate of the cost of a project. For the Suricata project it currently estimates cost of 2.1 million USD. Actual cost are significantly less than that, less than half of that. So either we are severely underpaid or the calculation is off quite a bit

The per developer code statistics show that I’ve “touched” 131k lines of code out of 148k which confirms what I already knew: I need some vacation…

Anyway, check it out. Vuurmuur is on there, as are Snort and ModSecurity.

Oh by the way, Suricata 1.0 coming out tomorrow!

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!

Also Richard Bejtlich and Nr have good posts about the improvements of the last versions. See Richards post about a fixed frag3 vulnerability here and see Nr’s post here.

Please note that our SVN code has seen limited testing so far, so be careful! Please report any issues!

First however, I will be traveling to California this week. I will be meeting Will there, so I’ll try to get him to fix that damn code

This update removes the libdnet dependency and replaces it with libnet 1.1. To be able to send ICMPv6 unreachable packets you will need the libnet 1.1 patch I wrote a while ago. You can find that here. Get the latest Snort_inline by checking out SVN:

svn co https://snort-inline.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/snort-inline/trunk

Consider the code to be of beta quality for now, so be careful with it. Please report any problems with it!

Again, a big thank you to NitroSecurity for funding this work!

Here are the instructions for getting your Snort 2.8.0.1 source patched:

Make sure you have a clean Snort 2.8.0.1 tree, then patch it:

cd snort-2.8.0.1
patch -p1 < ../snortsam-2.8.0.1.diff

Next, run ‘autojunk.sh’ to update the build system (you need to have libtoolize, aclocal, autoheader, autoconf and automake installed). After this, configure and build Snort normally:

./configure <your configure options>
make
make install

Thats it.

Thanks to Matt Jonkman of Emerging Threats for paying me to do this and CunningPike for doing the first iterations of the patch!

I think I speak for many if I say “Thanks” for all the hard work Jonkman has done for Bleeding, and I really look forward to new projects he will start or get involved in! Thanks Matt!