Slashdot Mirror
Is Open Source SNORT Dead?
alphadogg writes "Is Snort, the 12-year-old open-source intrusion detection and prevention system, dead?
The Open Information Security Foundation, a nonprofit group funded by the US Dept. of Homeland Security to come up with next-generation open source IDS/IPS, thinks so. But Snort's creator, Martin Roesch, begs to differ, and in fact, calls the OISF's first open source IDS/IPS code, Suricata 1.0 released this week, a cheap knock-off of Snort paid for with taxpayer dollars.
The OISF was founded about a year and a half ago with $1 million in funding from a DHS cybersecurity research program, according to Matt Jonkman, president of OISF. He says OISF was founded to form an open source alternative and replacement to Snort, which he says is now considered dead since the research on what is supposed to be the next-generation version of Snort, Snort 3.0, has stalled."
Snort is nowhere near dead - it's still used in tons of production environments, especially in higher ed (where we've always got plenty of Unix nerds on hand, and never have any money).
I would imagine Marty's objections probably have something to do with his desire to move people from Snort to the commercial IDS offerings from Sourcefire. That easy upsell doesn't exist if people start off on another product.
--saint
Okay, so a competing product comes out, they declare their competitor is dead, said competitor says "i'm not dead yet" and accuses them of being a cheap knockoff. Both sides continue to point out flaws or perceived flaws and throw FUD at each other.
The OISF was founded about a year and a half ago with $1 million in funding from a DHS cybersecurity research program . . .
Open Pork!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I should know, I wrote it.
Snort is developed at Sourcefire these days, the company I started and where I still serve as CTO. I am the lead developer on the Snort 3.0 project right now which is undergoing restructuring after the initial few releases showed performance issues that we weren't ready to live with.
Snort 2.x is developed by Sourcefire's engineering team, we release several updates a year to the code and updates to detection almost weekly via the Sourcefire VRT. I don't work on the 2.x code base day to day anymore but I do contribute from time to time. Snort 2.9.0 is slated for release this fall and continues 12 years of development on the engine technology which includes some significant innovation in the field of intrusion detection.
My issue with Suricata is that it has implemented the exact same *detection model* as Snort, it does nothing new from a detection standpoint but wraps it in a multithreaded framework that they're trying to call innovation all on its own. True innovation would be to develop a new way of detecting threats on the wire and they haven't done that, they effectively have implemented the same idea as Snort (processes Snort rules, buffers streams into chunks before processing, etc) on a slower software platform. They implemented what is effectively a Snort fork and did so at taxpayer expense, they got the government to pay them to develop something that the government already gets for free (Snort's detection model) with less features and lower performance.
Someday Suricata might be a really interesting engine but to go out to the press in a concerted push and advance the idea that "Snort is dead" reflects a stunning amount of hubris and wishful thinking. Snort is the most widely deployed IDS/IPS on the planet, there have been millions of downloads and there are hundreds of thousands of registered users and the community is still growing steadily. Snort's engine development is still moving forward and we have plans to continue to innovate in the field of intrusion detection. If the Suricata team wants to displace it they have a tremendous amount of work to do, they're not even close yet.