Download Suricata 4.0.0

Version 4.0 of Suricata has been released. Suricata is an open source network intrusion detection system (IDS), intrusion prevention system (IPS), and network security monitoring engine. It can be used to monitor network traffic and alert a system administrator if anything suspicious is detected. The Open Information Security Foundation is coordinating the development, with help from the community and various manufacturers. The with it on json Based logging system Eve collected data can be done with, among other things, log stash are used to display information graphically again at to give. In version 4.0, the detection capabilities have been improved, there are additional options for displaying the data and more protocols are supported.

Improved Detection

Based on valuable feedback from the rule writing teams at Emerging Threats and Positive Technologies we’ve added and improved many rule keywords for inspecting HTTP, SSH and other protocols. TLS additions were contributed by Mats Klepsland at NorCERT, including decoding, logging and matching on TLS serial numbers. Additionally, Suricata now allows rule writers to specify who’s the target in a signature. This information is used in EVE JSON logging to give more context with alerts.

TLS improved, NFS added

More on the TLS side: A major new feature is support for STARTTLS in SMTP and FTP. TLS sessions will now be logged in these cases. More goodness from Mats Klepsland. Also, TLS session resumption logging is now supported thanks to the work of Ray Ruvinskiy. Additional TLS logging improvements were done by Paulo Pacheco.

NFS decoding, logging and file extraction was added as part of the experimental Rust support. Read on for more information about Rust.

More EVE JSON

EVE is extended in several ways:

• in the case of encapsulated traffic both the inner and outer ip addresses and ports are logged
• the ‘vars’ facility logs flowbits and other vars. This can also be used to log data extracted from traffic using a PCRE statement in rules
• EVE can now be rotated based on time
• EVE was extended to optionally log the HTTP request and/or response bodies
• the (partial) flow record is added to alert records.

The ‘vars’ facility is one of the main improvements here, as it is now possible for a signature to accurately extract information for logging. For instance, a signature can extract an advertised software version or other information such as the recipient of an email.[[

First Step into a Safer Future

This is the first release in which we’ve implemented parts in the Rust language using the Nom parser framework. This work is inspired by Pierre Chiffliers’ (ANSSI), talk at SuriCon 2016 (pdf). By compiling with –enable-rest you’ll get a basic NFS parser and a re-implementation of the DNS parser. Feedback on this is highly appreciated.

The Rust support is still experimental, as we are continuing to explore how it functions, performs and what it will take to support it in the community. Additionally we included Pierre Chifflier’s Rust parser’s work. This uses external Rust parser ‘crates’ and is enabled by using –enable-rust-experimental. Initially this adds a NTP parser.

Under the Hood

A major TCP stream engine update is included. This should lead to better performance and less configuration, especially in IPS mode. First steps in TCP GAP recovery were taken, with implementations for DNS and NFS.

For developers, this release makes extending the detection engine with high performance keywords a lot easier. Adding a new high performance keyword using multi pattern matching does now requires only a few lines of code.

Documentation

David Wharton at SecureWorks has created a section in the documentation for rule writers who have a background in Snort. It documents changes that are relevant to writing rules.

Next steps

Based on the feedback we’ll get we’re expecting to do a 4.0.1 release in a month or so. Then we’ll start work on the next major release, which is 4.1. This is planned for late fall, ETA before SuriCon in Prague.

Logstash Kibana fed with information from Suricata with json output.