[Discussion] [Oisf-devel] [Emerging-Sigs] OISF Brainstorming Session Summary / Phase Three Draft Dev Roadmap

Tue Sep 27 13:02:14 UTC 2011

Those are pretty close to plain-text on the wire (for the most part)
and can usually be covered with the standard pattern matching engine.
Is there anything in particular you're looking for a SQL preprocessor
to do?

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Delta Yeh <delta.yeh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Since suri claim to have more advance app layer parser, is there any plan
> to add SQL traffic decode, like MySQL(open) MSSQL(freetds)
> PostgreSQL(open) and Oracle(from whireshark)?
>
>
> 2011/9/24 Martin Holste <mcholste at gmail.com>:
>> A few follow-up comments of my own from the conference on the roadmap:
>>
>>> Bro
>>> The Bro team was present and extremely helpful, thanks to all! We learned a lot about our similarities and differences, and have identified a number of places where code could be shared, event data and even reputation data. We are resolved to pursue a much closer relationship with the Bro team and Bro itself, including exploring how Suricata and Bro can work together in realtime to share data and events. They are very complementary tools.
>>>
>>
>> Indeed!  As the only (remote) conference attendee that I know of who
>> runs Snort, Suricata, and Bro in production on a very large network, I
>> have a few thoughts about how Bro affects the roadmap, inline:
>>
>>> Remote Attendance
>> Thanks again for that!
>>
>>> SSL Analyzer: High Priority / Medium Resources required
>>> This module will be implemented in two phases. The first phase will do the following:
>>>
>>
>> I strongly discourage this feature from being included in the
>> immediate roadmap because it is so completely covered by Bro, and
>> because the performance penalty for SSL processing is enormous in
>> modern enterprise networks.  It will be complete wheel-reinventing of
>> a feature that is very well provided by a different federal grant
>> funded IDS project.  I realize that Suricata, unlike Bro, would
>> provide a way to do inline filtering of SSL features, but the amount
>> of development effort it will take to properly implement this feature
>> will far outweigh the benefits and come at great opportunity cost for
>> other feature development which are lower-hanging fruit.
>>
>> If inline SSL blocking is really a priority, then I encourage a
>> development of a full-featured ICAP proxy interface be developed
>> instead.  That way, squid, or some other proxy, would intercept and
>> handle the SSL negotiation and defer to Suricata for allow/deny
>> decisions.  That would allow for sophisticated decisions to be made
>> without the performance penalty, and it would provide a universal
>> interface for other types of blocking decisions for basic HTTP.
>>
>>> Phase two will include the ability to decrypt sessions where keys are intercept-able, and the ability to provide private keys for local ssl relationships for decryption and analysis. We will consider the use of commodity crypto acceleration cards for this phase especially considering their reasonable cost.
>>>
>>
>> This is way out of the current scope, and as above, why I recommend
>> focusing on what Suricata does well: efficient pattern matching and
>> flow analysis for decision making.  Let the many freely available
>> traffic interceptors handle this work.  I would hate for this feature
>> to get in the way of improved performance.  For instance, while many
>> solutions deal with SSL, no other solutions use CUDA for pattern
>> matching.  I would rather see resources focused on doing what no one
>> else does, rather than reinventing features already available to the
>> community.
>>
>>> IP and DNS Reputation Distribution: High Priority / High Resources Required
>>
>> This is one of the features that is fairly unique to Suricata (at
>> least for live traffic) and so I really encourage this one.
>> Specifically, Suricata has the fastest IP matcher that I know of--it's
>> one of its greatest strengths.  Reputation allows Surciata to cash in
>> on this.
>>
>>> We also need to look into using something like the Common Intelligence Framework (CIF), and other similar projects for transport of data.
>>
>> More info on the excellent Collective Intelligence Framework can be
>> found here: http://code.google.com/p/collective-intelligence-framework/.
>>  It will allow Suricata to query all blacklists at the same time with
>> one query, and it will greatly augment any current incident response
>> team's capability, with or without IDS integration.
>>
>>> DNS Preprocessor and Anomaly Detection: High Priority / Medium Resources
>>
>>> Hosts with significantly more frequent lookups than peers in their network.
>>> Hosts with lookups resulting in frequent low TTL responses
>>> Domains that resolve to different IP addresses frequently
>>> Possible analysis of variance in DNS queries for the same domain (potential covert channels)
>>> Very regularly timed queries for the same domain name.
>>>
>>
>> I really think that the group has overestimated the value of the above
>> "anomalies" which are exhibited already by almost half of the hosts
>> visited on a normal network.  Queries to Amazon, Google, and Akamai,
>> to name a few, will have many queries with low TTL responses to
>> domains that change IP's frequently and have great variance in the
>> queries themselves.  Also, any legitimate software (Symantec, for
>> example), will make very regular DNS queries and do odd things with
>> TXT records.  In short, this isn't the low-hanging fruit you're
>> looking for in a Suricata feature.  Compared with IP reputation, this
>> will require a lot of work to implement, hurt performance, and provide
>> little value.
>>
>>> GEO IP: High Priority / Low Resources
>>> This module will use a geo-ip database such as Maxmind to allow geolocation of IP addresses.
>>>
>>
>> This would be awesome.  While GeoIP is only about 80% accurate, it's
>> still helpful, and because MaxMind has such an easy to use C library,
>> this can be very easily implemented without hurting performance.  This
>> would also be a feature unique (mostly) to Suricata, extending the
>> community IDS capabilities.
>>
>>> Live Ruleset Swapping: High Priority / Medium Resources
>>
>> This would be handy, but even a SIGHUP to reload (without live
>> swapping) would be a nice feature add.
>>
>> Thanks again for having the remote attendance available and the great
>> discussion at the conference.
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