Future Of IDS

A reader wrote to us about a summary article regarding IDS ^? . This is an interesting article in so far as it attempts to prognosticate what the future will be for detection, and that draws in some interesting work on security modelling. T: Readers may also want to see this vnunet article on IDS products -- guess what comes out on top?

Comments

Excellent IDS-related site

[doctor_oktagon]

Check this out for full info on a whole range of IDS systems ... hardware & software.

Network Intrusion ran by some guy who is extremely helpfull on the Security Focus IDS mailing list.

Um, details?

[the_rev_matt]

That was one of the most content-free articles I've ever seen this side of USA Today. Any chance of tracking down a detailed side by side analysis of the products tested with pros and cons and maybe WHY they thought snort was so much better (not that I disagree, but vagaries don't tend to be terribly convincing when presenting to management).

Re:Um, details?

[Flower]

Go to Snort's website. Note article "One Pig to Rule Them All." Find link directing you to here. Fill in the required info and download 4MB pdf. It's going to take me awhile to digest the nearly 250 pages of this report.

ACID and Barnyard for Snort users -- great stuff!

[jabbo]

I would have thought SecurityFocus could handle a /.'ing, but I guess not. It's a shame since they are one of the good, unbiased sources for security info out there.

Anyways, I want to throw in a shill for ACID for anyone who runs Snort. It makes my job SO INCREDIBLY MUCH EASIER that, well, I bother to do it every day, maybe two or three times a day, and haven't had any major incidents to speak of. If you run Snort, you ought to log to a centralized database that can handle the traffic from all your sensors, and then grind through it with ACID for starters. Yes, you should keep a packet vault; yes, you should run Nessus; yes, you still need to use TripWire or Integrit for filesystems. But having a friendly, capable frontend to Snort sensors is a HUGE help.

If you're running a lot of sensors and they get a ton of attacks in production, you should also look into the Barnyard plugin for Snort. It's nice for keeping things from slowing down.

If I were to take a stab at what would MOST help IDS and ISS research in the near future, I'd guess at the integration of tools like Nessus and Snort with a predictive intelligent agent like Intravenous or similar. I wish I could comment intelligently on the article, but mostly I wanted people using Snort to be aware of HOW helpful the ACID frontend is, so that more people use it, and I have less subnets to blackhole ;-).

Management console for Snort, take 2....

[jabbo]

Note: I fucked this up the first time by posting it as 'Extrans' when I meant to use HTML formatting. D'oh. Anyways, I've got karma to burn, so here's another whack at it...

See my earlier comment about ACID. Multisensor correlation and alert grouping, emailing of packet traces to offenders or CIO's, pretty much all you could ask for.

Try it. ACID homepage You may be pleasantly surprised at how easy Snort is to scale up. I have numerous sensors, all in production, all logging on all interfaces, all the time, and haven't had any major incidents on my subnet. I credit this partly to having early warning of when some idiot tries to attack my boxen, as well as to using Thoth for host monitoring, which makes it trivial to check that all my daemons are up-to-date, and all kernel patches are installed.

Someone pisses me off consistently, they get blackholed. This is something I'd recommend doing by hand, of course, but for people whose business I don't need or want, it's a great way to end the problem right then and there. :-)

Re:You misunderstand.

[monkeydo]

SNORT is a Network IDS. What you are describing is Host IDS. Two different things. SNORT tells you what is going on in your network. HIDS tells you what is going on on and to your host.

The point is to be aware, not to come down on them. If they knocked on the door, trying some exploit.. it's not worth your time to chase them down if it has no effect. On the other hand.. what if it turns out to be a rival company?

The point is _detection_ as in the three prongs of security, Protection, Detection, and Response.

Having a firewall (protection) without IDS (detection) is betting that your firewall is blocking everything bad, and not wanting to know if it isn't. Putting sensors inside and outside of your firewall allows you to see what is being attempted and what is being blocked. The IDS will flag things as possible attacks that will pass through the firewall, what you do when you IDS alarms is as important as having it in the first place.

The Firewall is the lock on your front door, the NIDS is your motion detector, and response is the alarm company sending the police.

Re:ACID and Barnyard for Snort users -- great stuf

[don_carnage]

ACID looks great...but it requires PHP. :^/

Does anyone have good information on how to compile Apache with mod_perl and PHP and SSL?

You pay for performance

[Krelnik]

That's all well and good, but have you ever tried to put SNORT with a large number of signatures enabled on a really high speed link that is well utilized?

I am afraid if you do you are in for a RUDE awakening. The fact of the matter is that these $20,000 solutions cost that much for a reason, and the reason is they've spent years optimizing them for high speed links. This is something the hobbiest programmers who work on Snort cannot compete with. For instance, what open source coder has a SMARTBITS on their desk? Something like that is essential to test these things, but they cost upwards of $10,000.

So I would say yes, if all you want to do is monitor a T1 or two, and you're willing to tinker alot, something like Snort would work. But if you have a SERIOUS network with lots of bandwidth, you're gonna have to pony up the dough.

Disclosure: I helped build one of the systems that Snort supposedly beat, and I analyzed the source code for another one that was bought by that company. Snort CANNOT beat either one in a high bandwidth situation. I've seen the code, I've run the tests, trust me.

I no longer work for that company so have little to gain by saying this.

Re:ACID and Barnyard for Snort users -- great stuf

[shanebush]

Don't know about the SSL side (haven't done it yet), but grab the sources for:
Apache, Mod-Perl, PHP, (for PHP, make sure you have the proper graphics librarys installed also so that Acid can display graphs. What you need is in the Install file in the Acid Source.

Here's what I used.. (Subsitute what ever version is current below)

#Mod-Perl Install
perl Makefile.PL \
APACHE_SRC=../apache_1.3.20/src \
DO_HTTPD=1 \
USE_APACI=1 \
PREP_HTTPD=1 \
EVERYTHING=1 \
[...]

make
make test
make install

#PHP 4 Install
./configure \
--with-mysql \
--with-apache=../apache_1.3.20 \
--enable-track-vars \
--enable-inline-optimization \
--enable-ftp \
--enable-sockets \
--with-gd \
--with-jpeg-dir=/usr/lib \
--with-zlib-dir=/usr/include \
--with-png-dir=/usr/lib \
--with-freetype-dir=/usr/lib

make
make install

#Apache Install
./configure \
--enable-module=most \
--enable-shared=max \
--activate-module=src/modules/php4/libphp4.a \
--activate-module=src/modules/perl/libperl.a

make
make install

#add to Httpd.conf
#AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

Note, please decend into the top level of each source tree before executing command to configure, make and install.
I know this is off-Topic, but there are several folks out there that can't figure out how to compile these together to get Acid to work correctly.

Re:Where's the proof?

[Flower]

Find the report.

From a brief initial read, it seems to be a fair review. It requires more work than the commercial offerings but is more flexible. And for their tests, they got comparable performance to the commercial products. To give a brief quote:

Configured correctly, it also turns in a performance every bit the equal of (and often superior to) commercial products costing many thousands of pounds.

You are right however, the current links are mostly fluff.

I monitor 2 DS-3's, that's all I need to...

[jabbo]

I can't speak to higher-end solutions, because as I mentioned in my response, I suspect they'll already have an architecture in place (eg. when I was at IBM Burlington, before Snort was even born, the setup they had created for monitoring ingress and egress traffic was far beyond what I've seen before or since).

But for my live production hosts, dual-homed on UUNet and Qwest, and all monitored, Snort + Barnyard + ACID have kept up without clipping traffic or interfering with operations. And yes, we DO saturate both of those links on occasion (though not always).

That's all I can speak to. When I worked at XOOM we saw traffic up to about 0.75Gbps steady and never bothered running an IDS, just were real fucking careful about what went live and keeping everything audited. An HP OpenView installation with some sort of IDS support was looking like $300K in bills. We said "fuck that" and to this day I wouldn't do any differently.

But, my situation may be very different from yours. If you need a $20K solution and its presence saves you $40K, you sure as hell don't need my blessing to buy it!