Starting with Suricata 0.9.0 the engine can run as an unprivileged user. For this create a new user called “suricata”.

useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false --user-group --comment “Suricata IDP account” suricata

This command will create a user and group called “suricata”. It will be unable to login as the shell is set to /bin/false.

The next thing to do is creating a configuration directory. Create /etc/suricata/ and copy the suricata.yaml example config into it. The example configuration can be found in the source archive you used to build Suricata:

mkdir /etc/suricata
cp /path/to/suricata-0.9.0/suricata.yaml /etc/suricata/
cp /path/to/suricata-0.9.0/classification.config /etc/suricata/

Next, create the log directory.

mkdir /var/log/suricata

The log directory needs to be writable for the user and group “suricata”, so change the ownership:

chown suricata:suricata /var/log/suricata

The last step I’ll be describing here is retrieving an initial ruleset. The 2 main rulesets you can use are Emerging Threats (ET) and Sourcefire’s VRT ruleset. Since putting VRT to use is a little bit more complicated I’ll be focussing on ET here.

First, download the emerging rules:

wget http://www.emergingthreats.net/rules/emerging.rules.tar.gz

Go to /etc/suricata/ and extract the rules archive:

cd /etc/suricata/
tar xzvf /path/to/emerging.rules.tar.gz

There is a lot more to rules, such as tuning and staying updated, but thats beyond the scope of this post.

Suricata is now ready to be started:

suricata -c /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml -i eth0 --user suricata --group suricata

If all is setup properly, Suricata will tell you it is now running:

[2087] 9/5/2010 — 18:17:47 – (tm-threads.c:1362) (TmThreadWaitOnThreadInit) — all 8 packet processing threads, 3 management threads initialized, engine started.

There are 3 log files in /var/log/suricata that will be interesting to monitor:

- stats.log: displays statistics on packets, tcp sessions etc.
- fast.log: a alerts log similar to Snort’s fast log.
- http.log: displays HTTP requests in a Apache style format.

This should get you going. There is a lot more to deploying Suricata that I plan to blog on later.

“As mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve been working to bring out tool to anonymously report IDS/IPS hits. Similar to DShield’s firewall log reporting, we believe we can make some incredible data inferences with this information, as well as help improve the quality of our signatures while giving us all feedback to tune our rulesets.

But that’s just the start. As with DShield’s data, I think we’ll run into benefits to the community that we can’t even imagine until we start to look at the data.”

The next step for the reporter is adding support for getting the events from Sguil. Expect to see that soon!

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!