[Oisf-users] OPNids - Any thoughts?

[Nelson, Cooper]

I’ve been doing NIDS deployments (bro/snort) for about fifteen years and HPC suricata deployments of the last five.  I also studied expert systems and machine learning in an academic environment about 25 years ago, so I’m familiar with the basics.

That said, there is a steep learning curve here and I’m not currently sure how we could make use of it in its current format (DVD ISO builds).  This would be fine for a small network or ‘greenfield’ deployment I think.

I would personally recommend starting with something like Security Onion and learning the basics of suricata (and getting familiar with it), before trying this distro.  I know it took me at least a year to get comfortable with suricata and I’m still learning stuff on a daily/weekly basis.

If someone could put together a docker build that could integrate with our existing suricata sensor I would be happy to try it out.

-Coop

From: Oisf-users <oisf-users-bounces at lists.openinfosecfoundation.org> On Behalf Of fatema bannatwala
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2019 1:41 PM
To: Open Information Security Foundation <oisf-users at lists.openinfosecfoundation.org>
Subject: [Oisf-users] OPNids - Any thoughts?

Hi,

So recently I was reading about the OPNids project and thought to give it a try it.
And as a new user complaining, had few unclear thoughts that I thought to share with the list.

First of, the documentation is little hard to decode, and was having trouble in installing OPNids with USB stick. But finally tried the virtual installation with the iso and it installed correctly.
The web GUI is good with all the nods and buttons, and user friendly options.

After reading so much about the "OPNids being the first integration of Suricata Signature Inspection with a Machine Learning Scripting Engine (MLE)" I though it already comes with MLE installed and integrated with Suricata in the installation package, which comes with the pre-build OS (FreeBSD) with other pre-installed services.

But unfortunately it does not. DragonFly MLE has to be manually installed on the OPNids system and proper configuration is needed to integrate it with Suricata, which makes me think that then how it is different than the situation of just having Suricata installed on one of the servers with OS of our choice, and then installing MLE on the same server integrating it with Suri and using it for ML analysis?

It was a little disappointment to know that apparently OPNids is nothing but Suricata with couple other services installed on a box, EXCEPT MLE... Hmm kinda sad.

And also, if someone has tried to ply around with it and would like to share experience/thoughts?

Thanks,
Fatema.
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