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Future Of IDS
Posted by
Hemos
on Wed Dec 05, 2001 12:12 PM
from the where-will-development-go dept.
from the where-will-development-go dept.
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?
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Hard to install and setup? (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Hard to install and setup? (Score:5, Funny)
Phase 1: apt-get install snort
Phase 2:
Phase 3: Security!
Excellent IDS-related site (Score:4, Informative)
Network Intrusion [networkintrusion.co.uk] ran by some guy who is extremely helpfull on the Security Focus IDS mailing list.
Large scale correlation (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, details? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Um, details? (Score:4, Informative)
Managers Like Names... (Score:4, Interesting)
In places where the budget is a bigger concern I still implement Snort. I can't possibly afford to stick a commercial product on every subnet that I'd like to.
Re:Managers Like Names... (Score:4, Insightful)
CEO's like $$$ (Score:4, Interesting)
Only choads that are getting kickbacks from manufacturers are going to push for overpriced commercial solutions in shops that don't have an existing IDS installation or a compelling reason to use the packaged solutions (NetRanger, OpenView, their ilk).
A packet is a packet... NFR and Snort are both designed by well-respected engineers who are more interested in accuracy and correctness than in unit shifting. I trust them for that.
When you get right down to it, unless you're rolling in dough, why blow $20,000 per management station plus consulting costs to implement something your network administrator can probably set up in a week for free? (I know I can) It's stupid. Save the cash for your coke dealer or a rock for the missus.
You pay for performance (Score:5, Informative)
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 [spirentcom.com] 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 [iss.net] that Snort supposedly beat, and I analyzed the source code for another one [networkice.com] 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.
I monitor 2 DS-3's, that's all I need to... (Score:4, Informative)
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!
ya know.... (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, Yesterday I get hit with about 90 attempts to get cmd.exe on my webserver from one specific IP addy. So, a quick nslookup / whois later and I get the server name and contact info for the suspected malicious box.
Since it's from a major site, I decide to contact them to let them know they may have a potentially compromised box on thier network.
Three v-mails and two emails later, no word back from them.
I'm all for IDS's, but aside from possibly dishing out some Louisville Slugger style 'cease and desist' requests, what good is the info?
argent out
Re:You misunderstand. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
New IDS model (Score:1)
ACID and Barnyard for Snort users -- great stuff! (Score:5, Informative)
Anyways, I want to throw in a shill for ACID [sourceforge.net] 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 [packetninja.net] 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 ;-).
It's in the process, stoopid (Score:4, Insightful)
Snort may be cheap and easy to install, but many corporations buy IDS on the strength of the management and reporting capability.
One of my clients went with Cisco Netranger IDS because it offers excellent Monitoring screens that are then staffed by a 24/7 response unit waiting for alerts on the border/dmz/back office networks. It then made it straightforward to sit semi-skilled staff in front of the consoles to monitor activity and alert a skilled technician (i.e. me in this case) if an amber or red warning occurred.
While Snort may be free, you would have to roll your own management stations (though I guess someone has done this), and thus management costs creep in.
PleasePleasePlease remember software costs are rarely in the price
DANGER: I'm not flaming snort, I just haven't had to chance to try and scale it up into an enterprise-type situation.
FIrewall Firewall Firewall (Score:4, Insightful)
The Future of IDS (Score:2, Funny)
Future of IDS (Score:3, Funny)
What?
Intrusion Detection Systems? You mean this isn't about Iain Duncan Smith?
Demarc Console frontend for Snort (Score:1)
Where's the proof? (Score:1)
The thing is that it's just a summary - no methodology is discussed - no results from the tests with any of the vendors - no reasons at all are given for crowning Snort the king.
Hell, for 10 minutes of work, I'll put up a web page that says Apache running off my wristwatch is the ultimate in web serving. Doesn't make it true...
mirrored (Score:1)
a world of 100% encryption? (Score:2)
The fundamental fact is that we will never get to the point where all traffic sent out over the great big I is encrypted. Its a matter of simple economics. Things like publicly available web sites, DNS, and even email don't need to be encrypted, nothing is gained by protecting that data. That's why it's a public service. Therefore, content providers (those deploying IDS) will never fork out the $$$ to buy equipment which can handle the load produced by millions of daily transactions that come down to just to encrypting index.html and decrypting GET index.html requests.
As an IDS analyst for the last two years in a Fortune 10 company, I can tell you from first-hand experience that 90%+ of the attacks we see on a daily basis are HTTP-based. DNS comes in second, because guess what? It's one of the needed public services offered by content providers on the Internet. Why encrypt data you're offering out to the whole world?
Nice article for CIOs, but I'm getting tired of hearing that encryption is going to get rid of NIDS. It's an omega point that we'll just never get to.
IDS Performance, False Positives, and The Future (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with that is that the number of alerts does not determine the efficiency and efficacy of an IDS does. As Stefan Axelsson points out in his paper "The Base Rate Fallacy and its Implications for the Difficulty of Intrusion Detection [raid-symposium.org], the real limiting factor in IDS performance will ALWAYS be the number of false positives generated.
Unfortunately, not many people seem to be working in the direction to deal with that problem. Most of the major IDS vendors are talking only in terms of getting faster, and having more rules.
The only company I've actually seen that is looking at any new paradigm to deal with this problem is nCircle [ncircle.com]. Their system has an IDS and a vulnerability scanner working together to accomplish the reduction in false positives.
It's not a perfect system, but it performs significantly better than any of the IDS products that I've seen. And it definitely shows some sort of vision into the future, and into dealing with the real problems with the way IDS is currently done.
Just my $0.02...
How to get round the slashdot filter (Score:2)
Writing Linux viruses is easy (slightly OT) (Score:3, Interesting)
I could try submitting this to
The State of IDS (Score:3, Interesting)
The basic problem with all IDS is in the confidence level of determining if something is an attack or just random garbage. Also, IDS have to be fast. If there's too much traffic (if you've been
Right now, nearly all IDSes are extremely primitive and consist of nothing more than snort [snort.org] rules [snort.org] and Perl [perl.com] scripts that call ipchains [samba.org] or something.
Btw, I went to RAID 2001 [raid-symposium.org] this year (hosted at UCD), it was fairly interesting.
prognosticate? (Score:1, Offtopic)
But when is Snort going to get good sigs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone ever bothered to actually READ the Snort signatures? I actually spent quite a few hours going over them and found a number of things:
1) Massive false postives. Almost all of the HTTP signatures only look for a request to a vulnerable CGI/ASP/etc, not for the actual exploit. This means perfectly normal/valid requests generate alerts.
2) Many sigs are easy to avoid. For HTTP sigs that actually try to look for the exploit it's generally a matter of putting a fake &var=value between the ? and the exploited param since Snort can only do simple string matching.
3) Many sigs are just plain stupid. I love the one that looks for the string "I love you" everywhere in all SMTP traffic. Heaven forbid someone at your company email their wife/husband/etc.
4) There's a number of sigs that have hard-coded strings for specific BROKEN exploits. Basically, they'll detect the broken exploit, which will catch the scriptkiddies, but anyone with half a brain who fixed the exploit won't be detected.
Unforunately, tuning the IDS (turning off signatures) isn't a valid means of reducing false positives since it makes you completely blind to the attack. Which means you either get deluged with alerts or miss legitimate threats to your network.
Honestly, I got so fed up with Snort and wasting my time with it, that I finally decided to get rid of it and spend the saved time being more proactive in securing my systems.
Links (Score:3, Interesting)
Automated Discovery of Concise Predictive Rules for Intrusion Detection [iastate.edu]
Snort & BigBrother (Score:2, Informative)
/Haeger
The false positive myth, & escalation vs detec (Score:2, Informative)
First, most IDS users focus on eliminating "false positives." This mindset, and especially ISS' goal of "zero false positives," is misguided.
I treat every IDS event as an "indicator," in the military intel idea of "indications and warnings." If I tell my IDS to find "X", and it reports "X", is that a false positive if "X" doesn't mean compromise? No, it's my responsibility to evaluate that indication by performing correlation and looking at the bigger picture.
Second, most IDS developers seem to focus on the detection aspect, i.e., can we detect at gigabit speeds? Can we detect Unicode-encoded attacks? This is necessary but not sufficient to perform network security monitoring.
IDS vendors need to understand that ESCALATION is the goal, not just detection. If the IDS doesn't provide enough supporting data to help me make a judgement without physically inspecting the target, why bother alerting at all? Why flash the red alert light if I must call the customer or do computer forensics to find out if the box is hacked?
Expect more rants in the form of a book (hopefully) late next year or sometime in '03.
Helevius
Get the real report from NSS. (Score:2, Informative)
Save yourself a few hours (Score:2)
in snort.conf:
change
var EXTERNAL_NET any
to
var EXTERNAL_NET !$HOME_NET
Otherwise, you'll see all your local hosts matching rules meant for external traffic. That's a little confusing.
Yet another clueless magazine... (Score:1)
Why oh why do they always call it freeware wrongly [gnu.org]?
The past of IDS (Score:2)
As I said, this was the Network ICE business plan from three years ago. We built a product to address these issues, we shipped it, we were successful, and this product is being mixed with the rest of ISS's technologies to become RealSecure 7.
I hate to come out with a "vendor" message, it is just that the author is most familiar with Snort, where these things are issues. He makes the assumption that other products are just commercialized versions of Snort. This isn't true -- at least in the case of our commercial product, it isn't related to Snort at all. He is maybe describing "The Future of Snort", but this is three years old for BlackICE.
Several comments (Score:2, Informative)
I just got in from a busy day and what do I find but a little Snort action on ole Slashdot...
So, I've got a few comments about the comments:
Snort signatures and the quality thereof. Anyone who complains about the quality of Snort signatures is a lazy bastard, they're open source and easy to modify, if you find that much wrong with them make the appropriate changes and mail them back to me or Brian Caswell [mailto], our own official Snort Rules Nazi. Just because we write Snort sigs doesn't mean you have to use them, the original concept behind Snort and the rules files that came with the distro was that the users could look at examples of how to write them and develop their own set for the site they were protecting. This has gotten way out of hand over the past three years and has blossomed into the approximately 1300 rules we have now. The quality isn't always the best, but we're working on it (and if you've been tracking them over the past 6 months they've gotten much better.
Performance. People from ISS talking about the superior performance of their solution is laughable, it's been shown repeatedly in third party IDS [networkcomputing.com] roundups [nss.co.uk] that Snort performs on par with or better than almost all of the other commercially available NIDS solutions out there. In fact, I know of one large entertainment company that sank a decent chunk of money into hardware that's running Snort at OC-12 speeds on their network successfully with no packet loss at all. Moral of the story? IDS performance is tied directly to the configuration and horsepower of the sensor hardware. No big revelations there. The fact of the matter is that's Snort's capabilities and performance keep increasing as we continue to develop it. We're also about to revisit some major architectural components of the system as we begin development on Snort 2.0 this month, but that's a different topic...
Love Snort but need a commercial company to back it? Check out Sourcefire [sourcefire.com], a company that I founded this year precisely to do that. We are selling network IDS appliances complete with a web-based GUI, data analysis console, and full blown configuration management system built in. We're also working on a Management Console appliance that will allow you to deploy and manage a distributed Snort NIDS infrastructure and manage all the data that comes out of the system and perform multi-sensor correlation.
Rapid response. When the shit hits the fan on the Internet, Snort is usually the leader in getting out new sigs to the user community. Case in point, the W32/Voyager MS SQL worm [cert.org] that recently came out, we were the first with sigs to pick it up.
So in the end, Snort gives you speed and accuracy (in that I mean you can identify specific exploits very precisely), has an active development and user community and is flexible to meet users needs. I think that this is a really good combo for most people's needs. Now that Sourcefire is out there, I think that the needs of "pro" users can be satisfied as well as those of the open source world.
On the other hand I might be biased, as I did write the thing... ;)
-Marty