[Oisf-announce] Announcing Suricata 5.0.0

[Victor Julien]

The OISF’s Suricata development team is proud to announce Suricata
5.0.0. This release brings many new features and improvements.

See https://suricata-ids.org/download/ for download options.

For release notes and upgrade guidance please see
https://suricata-ids.org/2019/10/15/release-notes-for-5-0-0/

*RDP, SNMP, FTP and SIP*

Three new protocol parsers and loggers, all community contributions.
Zach Kelley created a Rust RDP parser, while Giuseppe Longo created SIP
support. Rust master Pierre Chifflier contributed SNMP support. Since
RDP and SIP were merged late in our development cycle they are disabled
by default in the configuration. For FTP we have added an EVE logging
facility.

*JA3S*

After contributing JA3 support in Suricata 4.1, Mats Klepsland has been
working on JA3S support. JA3S is now available to the rule language and
in the TLS logging output.

*Datasets*

Still experimental at this time, the initial work to support datasets is
part of this release. It allows matching on large amounts of data. It is
controlled from the rule language and will work with any ‘sticky buffer’.

See documentation at
https://suricata.readthedocs.io/en/suricata-5.0.0/rules/datasets.html

We’ve already heard of people using this with millions of IOCs.

*Documentation*

With the help of many community members we’ve been improving the user
documentation. Please see:
https://suricata.readthedocs.io/en/suricata-5.0.0/

*HTTP evader*

We’ve been working hard to cover the final set of HTTP evader cases.
This work has mostly gone into the bundled libhtp 0.5.31.

*Rust*

The most visible is that our Rust support is no longer optional. We’re
convinced that Rust is a perfect match for Suricata, and we plan to
increase its footprint in our code base steadily. By making it mandatory
we’re able to remove parallel implementations and focus fully on making
the Rust code better.

*Protocol Detection*

The protocol detection engine has been extended to provide better
accuracy as well as support for dealing with asynchronous flows. These
async flows are sometimes picked up in the wrong direction and the
protocol detection engine can now reverse them.

*Decoder Anomaly records in EVE*

A new log record type has been added: ‘anomaly’. This logs the stream
and decoder events that are set by the packet decoders. This is inspired
by Zeeks (Bro) ‘weird’ log.

*EVE improvements*

VLAN and capture interface is now part of many more EVE records, even if
they are flow records or records based on flow time out.

An option to log all HTTP headers to the EVE http records has been added.

*Packet Capture*

Eric Leblond has been working hard to getting hardware offload support
working for eBPF. On Netronome cards the eBPF based flow bypass can now
be offloaded to the NIC. As eBPF is becoming a standard in the Linux
space, we are hoping to see other hardware offload soon as well.

Netmap support has been rewritten so the more advanced features of
netmap, such as vale switches, can be used now.

Napatech usability has been improved.

*Rule language: Sticky Buffers*

As discussed at the Suricon 2018 brainstorm session, a new rule keyword
scheme is being introduced. It takes the existing ‘sticky buffer’
approach with new keyword names to avoid confusion. The new scheme is
<proto>.<buffer>, so for example ‘http.uri’ for the URI inspection.

A number of HTTP keywords have been added.

Unified Lua inspection mixed with the sticky buffers has also been
implemented.

*Python 3*

With Python 2’s EOL approaching, we’ve made sure that all Suricata’s
python code is Python 3 compliant.

*Removals*

Following our deprecation policy, we have removed the following parts:
the plain text dns.log, the old files-json.log and support for the
Tilera architecture.

https://suricata-ids.org/about/deprecation-policy/

*All tickets*

Beta 1 tickets: https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/versions/115

RC 1 tickets: https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/versions/128

Final tickets: https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/versions/129

-- 
Victor Julien
Suricata Lead Developer
suricata-ids.org