Snort MANUAL
Snort MANUAL
Snort MANUAL
2.6.0
1
Contents
1 Snort Overview 7
1.1 Getting Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2 Sniffer Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 Packet Logger Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.4 Network Intrusion Detection System Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.4.1 NIDS Mode Output Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.4.2 Understanding Standard Alert Output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.4.3 High Performance Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.4.4 Changing Alert Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.5 Inline Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.5.1 Snort Inline Rule Application Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.5.2 New STREAM4 Options for Use with Snort Inline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.5.3 Replacing Packets with Snort Inline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.5.4 Installing Snort Inline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.5.5 Running Snort Inline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.5.6 Using the Honeynet Snort Inline Toolkit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.5.7 Troubleshooting Snort Inline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.6 Miscellaneous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.6.1 Running in Daemon Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.6.2 Obfuscating IP Address Printouts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.6.3 Specifying Multiple-Instance Identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.7 More Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2 Configuring Snort 16
2.0.1 Includes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.0.2 Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.0.3 Config . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.1 Preprocessors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.1.1 Frag2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.1.2 Frag3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.1.3 Stream4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2
2.1.4 Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.1.5 Portscan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.1.6 Flow-Portscan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.1.7 sfPortscan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.1.8 Telnet Decode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.1.9 RPC Decode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.1.10 Performance Monitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.1.11 HTTP Inspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.1.12 SMTP Preprocessor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.1.13 FTP/Telnet Preprocessor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.1.14 ASN.1 Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.2 Event Thresholding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.3 Output Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.3.1 alert syslog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.3.2 alert fast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.3.3 alert full . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.3.4 alert unixsock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.3.5 log tcpdump . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.3.6 database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.3.7 csv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.3.8 unified . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
2.3.9 alert prelude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
2.3.10 log null . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
2.4 Dynamic Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.4.1 Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.4.2 Directives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
3 Writing Snort Rules:How to Write Snort Rules and Keep Your Sanity 62
3.1 The Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.2 Rules Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.2.1 Rule Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.2.2 Protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.2.3 IP Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.2.4 Port Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.2.5 The Direction Operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.2.6 Activate/Dynamic Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.3 Rule Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.4 Meta-Data Rule Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.4.1 msg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3
3.4.2 reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.4.3 sid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.4.4 rev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.4.5 classtype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.4.6 Priority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.5 Payload Detection Rule Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.5.1 content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.5.2 nocase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.5.3 rawbytes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.5.4 depth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.5.5 offset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.5.6 distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.5.7 within . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.5.8 uricontent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.5.9 isdataat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
3.5.10 pcre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
3.5.11 byte test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.5.12 byte jump . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.5.13 ftpbounce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.5.14 regex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.5.15 content-list . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.6 Non-Payload Detection Rule Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.6.1 fragoffset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.6.2 ttl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.6.3 tos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.6.4 id . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3.6.5 ipopts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3.6.6 fragbits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3.6.7 dsize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3.6.8 flags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.6.9 flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.6.10 flowbits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.6.11 seq . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.6.12 ack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
3.6.13 window . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
3.6.14 itype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
3.6.15 icode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3.6.16 icmp id . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3.6.17 icmp seq . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4
3.6.18 rpc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.6.19 ip proto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.6.20 sameip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.7 Post-Detection Rule Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.7.1 logto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.7.2 session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.7.3 resp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.7.4 react . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
3.7.5 tag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.8 Event Thresholding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.8.1 Standalone Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.8.2 Standalone Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.8.3 Rule Keyword Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.8.4 Rule Keyword Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.8.5 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
3.9 Event Suppression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
3.9.1 Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
3.9.2 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
3.10 Snort Multi-Event Logging (Event Queue) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3.10.1 Event Queue Configuration Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3.10.2 Event Queue Configuration Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3.11 Writing Good Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.11.1 Content Matching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.11.2 Catch the Vulnerability, Not the Exploit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.11.3 Catch the Oddities of the Protocol in the Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.11.4 Optimizing Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
3.11.5 Testing Numerical Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
5
5.2.2 Detection Engine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
5.2.3 Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
5.3 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
5.3.1 Preprocessor Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5.3.2 Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
6
Chapter 1
Snort Overview
This manual is based on Writing Snort Rules by Martin Roesch and further work from Chris Green <cmg@snort.org>.
It is now maintained by Brian Caswell <bmc@snort.org>. If you have a better way to say something or find that
something in the documentation is outdated, drop us a line and we will update it. If you would like to submit patches
for this document, you can find the latest version of the documentation in LATEX format in the Snort CVS repository at
/doc/snort_manual.tex. Small documentation updates are the easiest way to help out the Snort Project.
• Sniffer mode, which simply reads the packets off of the network and displays them for you in a continuous
stream on the console (screen).
• Packet Logger mode, which logs the packets to disk.
• Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) mode, the most complex and configurable configuration, which
allows Snort to analyze network traffic for matches against a user-defined rule set and performs several actions
based upon what it sees.
• Inline mode, which obtains packets from iptables instead of from libpcap and then causes iptables to drop or
pass packets based on Snort rules that use inline-specific rule types.
./snort -v
This command will run Snort and just show the IP and TCP/UDP/ICMP headers, nothing else. If you want to see the
application data in transit, try the following:
./snort -vd
7
This instructs Snort to display the packet data as well as the headers. If you want an even more descriptive display,
showing the data link layer headers, do this:
./snort -vde
(As an aside, these switches may be divided up or smashed together in any combination. The last command could also
be typed out as:
./snort -d -v -e
Of course, this assumes you have a directory named log in the current directory. If you don’t, Snort will exit with
an error message. When Snort runs in this mode, it collects every packet it sees and places it in a directory hierarchy
based upon the IP address of one of the hosts in the datagram.
If you just specify a plain -l switch, you may notice that Snort sometimes uses the address of the remote computer
as the directory in which it places packets and sometimes it uses the local host address. In order to log relative to the
home network, you need to tell Snort which network is the home network:
This rule tells Snort that you want to print out the data link and TCP/IP headers as well as application data into the
directory ./log, and you want to log the packets relative to the 192.168.1.0 class C network. All incoming packets
will be recorded into subdirectories of the log directory, with the directory names being based on the address of the
remote (non-192.168.1) host.
4
! NOTE
Note that if both the source and destination hosts are on the home network, they are logged to a directory
with a name based on the higher of the two port numbers or, in the case of a tie, the source address.
If you’re on a high speed network or you want to log the packets into a more compact form for later analysis, you
should consider logging in binary mode. Binary mode logs the packets in tcpdump format to a single binary file in the
logging directory:
./snort -l ./log -b
Note the command line changes here. We don’t need to specify a home network any longer because binary mode
logs everything into a single file, which eliminates the need to tell it how to format the output directory structure.
Additionally, you don’t need to run in verbose mode or specify the -d or -e switches because in binary mode the entire
packet is logged, not just sections of it. All you really need to do to place Snort into logger mode is to specify a logging
directory at the command line using the -l switch—the -b binary logging switch merely provides a modifier that tells
Snort to log the packets in something other than the default output format of plain ASCII text.
Once the packets have been logged to the binary file, you can read the packets back out of the file with any sniffer that
supports the tcpdump binary format (such as tcpdump or Ethereal). Snort can also read the packets back by using the
8
-r switch, which puts it into playback mode. Packets from any tcpdump formatted file can be processed through Snort
in any of its run modes. For example, if you wanted to run a binary log file through Snort in sniffer mode to dump the
packets to the screen, you can try something like this:
You can manipulate the data in the file in a number of ways through Snort’s packet logging and intrusion detection
modes, as well as with the BPF interface that’s available from the command line. For example, if you only wanted to
see the ICMP packets from the log file, simply specify a BPF filter at the command line and Snort will only see the
ICMP packets in the file:
For more info on how to use the BPF interface, read the Snort and tcpdump man pages.
where snort.conf is the name of your rules file. This will apply the rules configured in the snort.conf file to
each packet to decide if an action based upon the rule type in the file should be taken. If you don’t specify an output
directory for the program, it will default to /var/log/snort.
One thing to note about the last command line is that if Snort is going to be used in a long term way as an IDS, the
-v switch should be left off the command line for the sake of speed. The screen is a slow place to write data to, and
packets can be dropped while writing to the display.
It’s also not necessary to record the data link headers for most applications, so you can usually omit the -e switch, too.
This will configure Snort to run in its most basic NIDS form, logging packets that trigger rules specified in the
snort.conf in plain ASCII to disk using a hierarchical directory structure (just like packet logger mode).
There are a number of ways to configure the output of Snort in NIDS mode. The default logging and alerting mecha-
nisms are to log in decoded ASCII format and use full alerts. The full alert mechanism prints out the alert message in
addition to the full packet headers. There are several other alert output modes available at the command line, as well
as two logging facilities.
Alert modes are somewhat more complex. There are seven alert modes available at the command line: full, fast,
socket, syslog, console, cmg, and none. Six of these modes are accessed with the -A command line switch. These
options are:
Option Description
-A fast Fast alert mode. Writes the alert in a simple format with a timestamp, alert message, source and
destination IPs/ports.
-A full Full alert mode. This is the default alert mode and will be used automatically if you do not specify
a mode.
-A unsock Sends alerts to a UNIX socket that another program can listen on.
-A none Turns off alerting.
-A console Sends “fast-style” alerts to the console (screen).
-A cmg Generates “cmg style” alerts.
9
Packets can be logged to their default decoded ASCII format or to a binary log file via the -b command line switch.
To disable packet logging altogether, use the -N command line switch.
For output modes available through the configuration file, see Section 2.3.
4
! NOTE
Command line logging options override any output options specified in the configuration file. This allows
debugging of configuration issues quickly via the command line.
To send alerts to syslog, use the -s switch. The default facilities for the syslog alerting mechanism are LOG AUTHPRIV
and LOG ALERT. If you want to configure other facilities for syslog output, use the output plugin directives in the
rules files. See Section 2.3.1 for more details on configuring syslog output.
For example, use the following command line to log to default (decoded ASCII) facility and send alerts to syslog:
As another example, use the following command line to log to the default facility in /var/log/snort and send alerts to a
fast alert file:
When Snort generates an alert message, it will usually look like the following:
The first number is the Generator ID, this tells the user what component of Snort generated this alert. For a list of
GIDs, please read etc/generators in the Snort source. In this case, we know that this event came from the “decode”
(116) component of Snort.
The second number is the Snort ID (sometimes referred to as Signature ID). For a list of preprocessor SIDs, please see
etc/gen-msg.map. Rule-based SIDs are written directly into the rules with the sid option. In this case, 56 represents a
T/TCP event.
The third number is the revision ID. This number is primarily used when writing signatures, as each rendition of the
rule should increment this number with the rev option.
If you want Snort to go fast (like keep up with a 1000 Mbps connection), you need to use unified logging and a unified
log reader such as barnyard. This allows Snort to log alerts in a binary form as fast as possible while another program
performs the slow actions, such as writing to a database.
If you want a text file that’s easily parsable, but still somewhat fast, try using binary logging with the “fast” output
mechanism.
This will log packets in tcpdump format and produce minimal alerts. For example:
10
1.4.4 Changing Alert Order
The default way in which Snort applies its rules to packets may not be appropriate for all installations. The Alert rules
are applied first, then the Pass rules, and finally, Log rules are applied. This sequence is somewhat counterintuitive,
but it’s a more foolproof method than allowing a user to write a hundred alert rules that are then disabled by an errant
pass rule. For more information on rule types, see Section 3.2.1.
If you know what you’re doing, you can use the -o switch to change the default rule application behavior to apply Pass
rules, then Alert rules, then Log rules:
As of Snort 2.6.0, the command line flags --alert-before-pass and --treat-drop-as-alert were added to han-
dle changes to rule ordering and fix an issue when pass and drop rules were not always enforced. The --alert-before-pass
option forces alert rules to take affect in favor of a pass rule. The --treat-drop-as-alert causes drop, sdrop, and
reject rules and any associated alerts to be logged as alerts, rather then the normal action. This allows use of an inline
policy with passive/IDS mode.
Additionally, the --process-all-events option causes Snort to process every event associated with a packet, while
taking the actions based on the rules ordering. Without this option (default case), only the events for the first action
based on rules ordering are processed.
4
! NOTE
Pass rules are special cases here, in that the event processing is terminated when a pass rule is encountered,
regardless of the use of --process-all-events.
4
! NOTE
The additions with Snort 2.6.0 will result in the deprecation of the -o switch in a future release.
• drop - The drop rule type will tell iptables to drop the packet and log it via usual Snort means.
• reject - The reject rule type will tell iptables to drop the packet, log it via usual Snort means, and send a TCP
reset if the protocol is TCP or an icmp port unreachable if the protocol is UDP.
• sdrop - The sdrop rule type will tell iptables to drop the packet. Nothing is logged.
4
! NOTE
You can also replace sections of the packet payload when using Snort Inline. See Section 1.5.3 for more
information.
When using a reject rule, there are two options you can use to send TCP resets:
11
• You can use a RAW socket (the default behavior for Snort Inline), in which case you must have an interface
that has an IP address assigned to it. If there is not an interface with an IP address assigned with access to the
source of the packet, the packet will be logged and the reset packet will never make it onto the network.
• You can also now perform resets via a physical device when using iptables. We take the indev name from
ip queue and use this as the interface on which to send resets. We no longer need an IP loaded on the bridge,
and can remain pretty stealthy as the config layer2 resets in snort inline.conf takes a source MAC address
which we substitue for the MAC of the bridge. For example:
config layer2resets
tells Snort Inline to use layer2 resets and uses the MAC address of the bridge as the source MAC in the
packet, and:
config layer2resets: 00:06:76:DD:5F:E3
will tell Snort Inline to use layer2 resets and uses the source MAC of 00:06:76:DD:5F:E3 in the reset packet.
->activation->dynamic->drop->sdrop->reject->alert->pass->log
This will ensure that a drop rule has precedence over an alert or log rule. You can use the -o flag to change the rule
application order to:
->activation->dynamic->pass->drop->sdrop->reject->alert->log
When using Snort Inline, you can use two additional stream4 options:
Additionally, Jed Haile’s content replace code allows you to modify packets before they leave the network. For
example:
alert tcp any any <> any 80 (msg: "tcp replace"; content:"GET"; replace:"BET";)
alert udp any any <> any 53 (msg: "udp replace"; \
content: "yahoo"; replace: "xxxxx";)
These rules will comb TCP port 80 traffic looking for GET, and UDP port 53 traffic looking for yahoo. Once they are
found, they are replaced with BET and xxxxx, respectively. The only catch is that the replace must be the same length
as the content.
12
1.5.4 Installing Snort Inline
./configure --enable-inline
make
make install
First, you need to ensure that the ip queue module is loaded. Then, you need to send traffic to Snort Inline using the
QUEUE target. For example:
sends all TCP traffic leaving the firewall going to port 80 to the QUEUE target. This is what sends the packet from
kernel space to user space (Snort Inline). A quick way to get all outbound traffic going to the QUEUE is to use the
rc.firewall script created and maintained by the Honeynet Project (http://www.honeynet.org/papers/honeynet/tools/)
This script is well-documented and allows you to direct packets to Snort Inline by simply changing the QUEUE
variable to yes.
Finally, start Snort Inline:
Ideally, Snort Inline will be run using only its own drop.rules. If you want to use Snort for just alerting, a separate
process should be running with its own rule set.
The Honeynet Snort Inline Toolkit is a statically compiled Snort Inline binary put together by the Honeynet Project
for the Linux operating system. It comes with a set of drop.rules, the Snort Inline binary, a snort-inline rotation
shell script, and a good README. It can be found at:
http://www.honeynet.org/papers/honeynet/tools/
13
More than likely, the ip queue module is not loaded or ip queue support is not compiled into your kernel. Either
recompile your kernel to support ip queue, or load the module.
The ip queue module is loaded by executing:
insmod ip_queue
Also, if you want to ensure Snort Inline is getting packets, you can start it in the following manner:
This will display the header of every packet that Snort Inline sees.
1.6 Miscellaneous
If you want to run Snort in daemon mode, you can the add -D switch to any combination described in the previous
sections. Please notice that if you want to be able to restart Snort by sending a SIGHUP signal to the daemon, you
must specify the full path to the Snort binary when you start it, for example:
/usr/local/bin/snort -d -h 192.168.1.0/24 \
-l /var/log/snortlogs -c /usr/local/etc/snort.conf -s -D
When Snort is run in daemon mode, the daemon creates a PID file in the log directory. In Snort 2.6, the --pid-path
command line switch causes Snort to write the PID file in the directory specified.
Additionally, the --create-pidfile switch can be used to force creation of a PID file even when not running in
daemon mode.
If you need to post packet logs to public mailing lists, you might want to use the -O switch. This switch obfuscates
your IP addresses in packet printouts. This is handy if you don’t want people on the mailing list to know the IP
addresses involved. You can also combine the -O switch with the -h switch to only obfuscate the IP addresses of hosts
on the home network. This is useful if you don’t care who sees the address of the attacking host. For example, you
could use the following command to read the packets from a log file and dump them to the screen, obfuscating only
the addresses from the 192.168.1.0/24 class C network:
In Snort v2.4, the -G command line option was added that specifies an instance identifier for the event logs. This option
can be used when running multiple instances of snort, either on different CPUs, or on the same CPU but a different
interface. Each Snort instance will use the value specified to generate unique event IDs. Users can specify either a
decimal value (-G 1) or hex value preceded by 0x (-G 0x11). This is also supported via a long option --logid.
14
1.7 More Information
Chapter 2 contains much information about many configuration options available in the configuration file. The Snort
manual page and the output of snort -? or snort --help contain information that can help you get Snort running
in several different modes.
4
! NOTE
In many shells, a backslash (\) is needed to escape the ?, so you may have to type snort -\? instead of
snort -? for a list of Snort command line options.
The Snort web page (http://www.snort.org) and the Snort Users mailing list (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=snort-users
at snort-users@lists.sourceforge.net provide informative announcements as well as a venue for community
discussion and support. There’s a lot to Snort, so sit back with a beverage of your choosing and read the documenta-
tion and mailing list archives.
15
Chapter 2
Configuring Snort
2.0.1 Includes
The include keyword allows other rules files to be included within the rules file indicated on the Snort command line.
It works much like an #include from the C programming language, reading the contents of the named file and adding
the contents in the place where the include statement appears in the file.
Format
4
! NOTE
Note that there is no semicolon at the end of this line.
Included files will substitute any predefined variable values into their own variable references. See Section 2.0.2 for
more information on defining and using variables in Snort rules files.
2.0.2 Variables
Variables may be defined in Snort. These are simple substitution variables set with the var keyword as shown in
Figure 2.1.
Format
Rule variable names can be modified in several ways. You can define meta-variables using the $ operator. These can
be used with the variable modifier operators ? and -, as described in the following table:
16
Variable Syntax Description
var Defines a meta-variable.
$(var) or $var Replaces with the contents of variable var.
$(var:-default) Replaces the contents of the variable var with “default” if var is undefined.
$(var:?message) Replaces with the contents of variable var or prints out the error message and exits.
See Figure 2.2 for an example of advanced variable usage in action.
2.0.3 Config
Many configuration and command line options of Snort can be specified in the configuration file.
Format
Directives
17
set gid config set gid: 30 Changes GID to specified GID (snort
-g).
set uid set uid: snort user Sets UID to <id> (snort -u).
utc config utc Uses UTC instead of local time for
timestamps (snort -U).
verbose config verbose Uses verbose logging to STDOUT
(snort -v).
dump payload verbose config dump payload verbose Dumps raw packet starting at link layer
(snort -X).
show year config show year Shows year in timestamps (snort -y).
stateful config stateful Sets assurance mode for stream4 (est).
See the stream4 reassemble configura-
tion in table 2.3.
min ttl config min ttl:30 Sets a Snort-wide minimum ttl to ignore
all traffic.
disable decode alerts config disable decode alerts Turns off the alerts generated by the de-
code phase of Snort.
disable tcpopt experimental config disable tcpopt experiment Turns off alerts generated by experimen-
alerts al alerts tal TCP options.
disable tcpopt experimental config disable tcpopt experiment Turns off alerts generated by experimen-
alerts al alerts tal TCP options.
disable tcpopt obsolete config disable tcpopt obsolete Turns off alerts generated by obsolete
alerts alerts TCP options.
disable tcpopt ttcp alerts config disable tcpopt ttcp alerts Turns off alerts generated by T/TCP op-
tions.
disable ttcp alerts config disable ttcp alerts Turns off alerts generated by T/TCP op-
tions.
disable tcpopt alerts config disable tcpopt alerts Disables option length validation alerts.
disable ipopt alerts config disable ipopt alerts Disables IP option length validation
alerts.
disable decode drops config disable decode drops Disables the dropping of bad packets
identified by decoder (only applicable in
inline mode).
disable tcpopt experimental config disable tcpopt experi Disables the dropping of bad packets
drops mental drops with obsolete TCP option (only applica-
ble in inline mode).
disable ttcp drops disable ttcp drops Disables the dropping of bad packets
with TCP echo option (only applicable
in inline mode).
disable tcpopt drops config disable tcpopt drops Disables the dropping of bad packets
with bad/truncated TCP option (only ap-
plicable in inline mode).
disable ipopt drops config disable ipopt drops Disables the dropping of bad packets
with bad/truncated IP options (only ap-
plicable in inline mode).
flowbits size config flowbits size: 128 Specifies the maximum number of flow-
bit tags that can be used within a rule set.
18
event queue config event queue: max queue Specifies conditions about Snort’s event
512 log 100 order events queue. You can use the following op-
priority tions:
• max queue <integer> (max
events supported)
• log <integer> (number of
events to log)
• order events
[priority|content length]
(how to order events within the
queue)
See Section 3.10 for more information
and examples.
layer2resets config layer2resets: This option is only available when run-
00:06:76:DD:5F:E3 ning in inline mode. See Section 1.5.
detection config detection: Makes changes to the detection engine.
search-method ac The following options can be used:
no stream inserts
max queue events 128 • search-method<ac|ac-std|acs|
ac-banded|ac-sparsebands|
mwm|lowmem>
– ac Aho-Corasick Full (high
memory, best performance)
– ac-std Aho-Corasick Stan-
dard (moderate memory,
high performance)
– acs Aho-Corasick Sparse
(small memory, moderate
performance)
– ac-banded Aho-Corasick
Banded (small memory,
moderate performance)
– ac-sparebands Aho-
Corasick Sparse-Banded
(small memory, high perfor-
mance)
– lowmem Low Memory Key-
word Trie (small memory,
low performance)
– mwm Wu-Manber (small
memory, low performance)
• no stream inserts
• max queue events<integer>
19
read bin file config read bin file: Specifies a pcap file to use (instead of
test alert.pcap reading from network), same effect as -
r <tf> option.
reference config reference: myref Adds a new reference system to Snort.
http://myurl.com/?id=
ignore ports config ignore ports: udp 1:17 Specifies ports to ignore (useful for ig-
53 noring noisy NFS traffic). Specify the
protocol (TCP, UDP, IP, or ICMP), fol-
lowed by a list of ports. Port ranges are
supported.
4
!
TheNOTE
Wu-Manber pattern matching engine (search-method mwm) will be deprecated in a future Snort release
in favor of pattern matching algorithms with better performance and smaller memory consumption.
20
2.1 Preprocessors
Preprocessors were introduced in version 1.5 of Snort. They allow the functionality of Snort to be extended by allowing
users and programmers to drop modular plugins into Snort fairly easily. Preprocessor code is run before the detection
engine is called, but after the packet has been decoded. The packet can be modified or analyzed in an out-of-band
manner using this mechanism.
Preprocessors are loaded and configured using the preprocessor keyword. The format of the preprocessor directive
in the Snort rules file is:
2.1.1 Frag2
4
! NOTE
Frag2 is deprecated in Snort 2.4.0 and later in favor of frag3. See Section 2.1.2 for more information about
frag3.
2.1.2 Frag3
The frag3 preprocessor is a target-based IP defragmentation module for Snort. Frag3 is intended as a replacement for
the frag2 defragmentation module and was designed with the following goals:
The frag2 preprocessor used splay trees extensively for managing the data structures associated with defragmenting
packets. Splay trees are excellent data structures to use when you have some assurance of locality of reference for the
data that you are handling but in high speed, heavily fragmented environments the nature of the splay trees worked
against the system and actually hindered performance. Frag3 uses the sfxhash data structure and linked lists for data
handling internally which allows it to have much more predictable and deterministic performance in any environment
which should aid us in managing heavily fragmented environments.
Target-based analysis is a relatively new concept in network-based intrusion detection. The idea of a target-based
system is to model the actual targets on the network instead of merely modeling the protocols and looking for attacks
within them. When IP stacks are written for different operating systems, they are usually implemented by people
who read the RFCs and then write their interpretation of what the RFC outlines into code. Unfortunately, there are
ambiguities in the way that the RFCs define some of the edge conditions that may occurr and when this happens
different people implement certain aspects of their IP stacks differently. For an IDS this is a big problem.
In an environment where the attacker can determine what style of IP defragmentation is being used on a partic-
ular target, the attacker can try to fragment packets such that the target will put them back together in a specific
manner while any passive systems trying to model the host traffic have to guess which way the target OS is going
to handle the overlaps and retransmits. As I like to say, if the attacker has more information about the targets on
a network than the IDS does, it is possible to evade the IDS. This is where the idea for “target-based IDS” came
from. For more detail on this issue and how it affects IDS, check out the famous Ptacek & Newsham paper at
http://www.snort.org/docs/idspaper/.
21
The basic idea behind target-based IDS is that we tell the IDS information about hosts on the network so that it can
avoid Ptacek & Newsham style evasion attacks based on information about how an individual target IP stack operates.
Vern Paxson and Umesh Shankar did a great paper on this very topic in 2003 that detailed mapping the hosts on a net-
work and determining how their various IP stack implementations handled the types of problems seen in IP defragmen-
tation and TCP stream reassembly. Check it out at http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/activemap-oak03.pdf.
We can also present the IDS with topology information to avoid TTL-based evasions and a variety of other issues, but
that’s a topic for another day. Once we have this information we can start to really change the game for these complex
modeling problems.
Frag3 was implemented to showcase and prototype a target-based module within Snort to test this idea.
Frag 3 Configuration
Frag3 configuration is somewhat more complex than frag2. There are at least two preprocessor directives required
to activate frag3, a global configuration directive and an engine instantiation. There can be an arbitrary number of
engines defined at startup with their own configuration, but only one global configuration.
Global Configuration
Engine Configuration
22
Platform Type
AIX 2 BSD
AIX 4.3 8.9.3 BSD
Cisco IOS Last
FreeBSD BSD
HP JetDirect (printer) BSD-right
HP-UX B.10.20 BSD
HP-UX 11.00 First
IRIX 4.0.5F BSD
IRIX 6.2 BSD
IRIX 6.3 BSD
IRIX64 6.4 BSD
Linux 2.2.10 linux
Linux 2.2.14-5.0 linux
Linux 2.2.16-3 linux
Linux 2.2.19-6.2.10smp linux
Linux 2.4.7-10 linux
Linux 2.4.9-31SGI 1.0.2smp linux
Linux 2.4 (RedHat 7.1-7.3) linux
MacOS (version unknown) First
NCD Thin Clients BSD
OpenBSD (version unknown) linux
OpenBSD (version unknown) linux
OpenVMS 7.1 BSD
OS/2 (version unknown) BSD
OSF1 V3.0 BSD
OSF1 V3.2 BSD
OSF1 V4.0,5.0,5.1 BSD
SunOS 4.1.4 BSD
SunOS 5.5.1,5.6,5.7,5.8 First
Tru64 Unix V5.0A,V5.1 BSD
Vax/VMS BSD
Windows (95/98/NT4/W2K/XP) First
format
preprocessor frag3_global
preprocessor frag3_engine
Note in the advanced example (Figure 2.5), there are three engines specified running with Linux, first and last
policies assigned. The first two engines are bound to specific IP address ranges and the last one applies to all other
traffic. Packets that don’t fall within the address requirements of the first two engines automatically fall through to the
third one.
23
Frag 3 Alert Output
Frag3 is capable of detecting eight different types of anomalies. Its event output is packet-based so it will work with
all output modes of Snort. Read the documentation in the doc/signatures directory with filenames that begin with
“123-” for information on the different event types.
2.1.3 Stream4
The Stream4 module provides TCP stream reassembly and stateful analysis capabilities to Snort. Robust stream
reassembly capabilities allow Snort to ignore ”stateless” attacks (which include the types of attacks that Stick and
Snot produce). Stream4 also gives large scale users the ability to track many simultaneous TCP streams. Stream4
is set to handle 8192 simultaneous TCP connections in its default configuration; however, it scales to handle over
100,000 simultaneous connections.
Stream4 contains two configurable modules: the Stream4 preprocessor and the associated Stream4 reassemble plugin.
The stream4 reassemble options are listed below.
4
! NOTE
Additional options can be used if Snort is running in inline mode. See Section 1.5.2 for more information.
Stream4 Format
24
Option Description
asynchronous link Uses state transitions based only on one-sided conversation (no tracking of acknowl-
edge/sequence numbers).
cache clean percent Purges this percent of least-recently used sessions from the session cache (overrides
cache clean sessions).
cache clean sessions Purges this number of least-recently used sessions from the session cache.
detect scans Turns on alerts for portscan events.
detect state problems Turns on alerts for stream events of note, such as evasive RST packets, data on the SYN
packet, and out of window sequence numbers.
enforce state Enforces statefulness so that sessions aren’t picked up mid-stream.
keepstats Records session summary information in <logdir>/session.log. If no options are
specified, output is human readable.
log flushed streams Log the packets that are part of reassembled stream.
disable evasion alerts Turns off alerts for events such as TCP overlap.
timeout <seconds> Amount of time to keep an inactive stream in the state table; sessions that are flushed will
automatically be picked up again if more activity is seen. The default value is 30 seconds.
memcap <bytes> Sets the number of bytes used to store packets for reassembly.
max sessions Sets the maximum number of simultaneous sessions.
noinspect Disables stateful inspection.
ttl limit Sets the delta value that will set off an evasion alert.
self preservation threshold Set limit on number of sessions before entering self-preservation mode (only reassemble
data on the default ports).
self preservation period Set length of time (seconds) to remain in self-preservation mode.
suspend threshold Sets limit on number of sessions before entering suspend mode (no reassembly).
suspend period Sets length of time (seconds) to remain in suspend mode.
server inspect limit Restricts inspection of server traffic to this many bytes until another client request is seen
(ie: client packet with data).
state protection Protects self against DoS attacks.
25
Option Description
clientonly Provides reassembly for the client side of a connection only.
serveronly Provides reassembly for the server side of a connection only.
both Reassemble for client and server sides of connection.
noalerts Won’t alert on events that may be insertion or evasion attacks.
favor old Favor old segments based on sequence number over a new segments.
favor new Favor new segments based on sequence number over a old segments.
flush on alert Flush a stream when an individual packet causes an alert.
flush behavior <number> Use specified flush behavior. Number greater than 0 means use old static flush points.
Number equal to 0 means use new larger flush points. Number less than 0 means use
random flush points defined by flush base, flush seed, and flush range.
flush base <number> Lowest allowed random flushpoint. The default value is 512 bytes. Only used if
flush behavior is less than 0.
flush range <number> Space within random flushpoints are generated. The default value is 1213. Only used if
flush behavior is less than 0.
flush seed <number> Random seed for flushpoints. The default value is computed from Snort PID + time. Only
used if flush behavior is less than 0.
overlap limit Alert when the number of overlapping data bytes reaches a threshold.
ports <portlist> Provides reassembly for a whitespace-separated list of ports. By default, reassembly is
performed for ports 21, 23, 25, 42, 53, 80, 110, 111, 135, 136, 137, 139, 143, 445, 513,
1443, 1521, and 3306. To perform reassembly for all ports, use all as the port list.
flush data diff size <number> minumum size of a packet to zero out the empty space in a rebuilt packet.
zero flushed packets Zero out any space that is not filled in when flushing a rebuilt packet.
Notes
Just setting the stream4 and stream4 reassemble directives without arguments in the snort.conf file will set them
up in their default configurations shown in Table
Table2.2 andStream4
2.2: Table 2.3.
Defaults
Option Default
session timeout (timeout) 30 seconds
session memory cap (memcap) 8388608 bytes
stateful inspection (noinspect) active (noinspect disabled)
stream stats (keepstats) inactive
state problem alerts (detect state problems) inactive (detect state problems disabled)
evasion alerts (disable evasion alerts) inactive (disable evasion alerts enabled)
asynchronous link (asynchronous link) inactive
log flushed streams (log flushed streams) inactive
max sessions (max sessions) 8192
session cache purge (cache clean sessions) 5
session cache purge percent (cache clean percent) inactive
self preservation threshold (self preservation threshold) 50 sessions/sec
self preservation period (self preservation period) 90 seconds
suspend threshold (suspend threshold) 200 sessions/sec
suspend period (suspend period) 30 seconds
state protection (state protection) inactive
server inspect limit (server inspect limit) -1 (inactive)
26
Table 2.3: stream4 reassemble Defaults
Option Default
reassemble client (clientonly) active
reassemble server (serveronly) inactive
reassemble both (both) inactive
reassemble ports (ports) 21 23 25 42 53 80 110 111 135 136 137 139 143 445 513 1433 1521 3306
reassembly alerts (noalerts) active (noalerts disabled)
favor old packet (favor old) active
favor new packet (favor new) inactive
flush on alert (flush on alert) inactive
overlap limit (overlap limit) -1 (inactive)
27
2.1.4 Flow
The Flow tracking module is meant to start unifying the state keeping mechanisms of Snort into a single place. As of
Snort 2.1.0, only a portscan detector is implemented, but in the long term, many of the stateful subsystems of Snort
will be migrated over to becoming flow plugins. With the introduction of flow, this effectively makes the conversation
preprocessor obsolete.
An IPv4 flow is unique when the IP protocol (ip proto), source IP (sip), source port (sport), destination IP (dip),
and destination port (dport) are the same. The dport and sport are 0 unless the protocol is TCP or UDP.
Format
table.
b 1 - hash by byte, 2 - hash by integer (faster, not as much of a chance to become diverse). The hash table has a pseudo-random salt
Example Configuration
2.1.5 Portscan
4
! NOTE
The ”Portscan” preprocessor was deprecated in Snort 2.2, in favor of Flow Portscan, which was deprecated
in Snort 2.3, in favor of sfPortscan.
2.1.6 Flow-Portscan
4
! NOTE
The Flow-Portscan preprocessor was deprecated in Snort 2.3, in favor of sfPortscan.
2.1.7 sfPortscan
The sfPortscan module, developed by Sourcefire, is designed to detect the first phase in a network attack: Recon-
naissance. In the Reconnaissance phase, an attacker determines what types of network protocols or services a host
supports. This is the traditional place where a portscan takes place. This phase assumes the attacking host has no prior
knowledge of what protocols or services are supported by the target; otherwise, this phase would not be necessary.
28
As the attacker has no beforehand knowledge of its intended target, most queries sent by the attacker will be negative
(meaning that the service ports are closed). In the nature of legitimate network communications, negative responses
from hosts are rare, and rarer still are multiple negative responses within a given amount of time. Our primary objective
in detecting portscans is to detect and track these negative responses.
One of the most common portscanning tools in use today is Nmap. Nmap encompasses many, if not all, of the current
portscanning techniques. sfPortscan was designed to be able to detect the different types of scans Nmap can produce.
sfPortscan will currently alert for the following types of Nmap scans:
• TCP Portscan
• UDP Portscan
• IP Portscan
These alerts are for one→one portscans, which are the traditional types of scans; one host scans multiple ports on
another host. Most of the port queries will be negative, since most hosts have relatively few services available.
sfPortscan also alerts for the following types of decoy portscans:
Decoy portscans are much like the Nmap portscans described above, only the attacker has a spoofed source address
inter-mixed with the real scanning address. This tactic helps hide the true identity of the attacker.
sfPortscan alerts for the following types of distributed portscans:
These are many→one portscans. Distributed portscans occur when multiple hosts query one host for open services.
This is used to evade an IDS and obfuscate command and control hosts.
4
! NOTE
Negative queries will be distributed among scanning hosts, so we track this type of scan through the scanned
host.
• TCP Portsweep
• UDP Portsweep
• IP Portsweep
• ICMP Portsweep
These alerts are for one→many portsweeps. One host scans a single port on multiple hosts. This usually occurs when
a new exploit comes out and the attacker is looking for a specific service.
4
! NOTE
The characteristics of a portsweep scan may not result in many negative responses. For example, if an attacker
portsweeps a web farm for port 80, we will most likely not see many negative responses.
29
sfPortscan alerts on the following filtered portscans and portsweeps:
“Filtered” alerts indicate that there were no network errors (ICMP unreachables or TCP RSTs) or responses on closed
ports have been suppressed. It’s also a good indicator of whether the alert is just a very active legitimate host. Active
hosts, such as NATs, can trigger these alerts because they can send out many connection attempts within a very small
amount of time. A filtered alert may go off before responses from the remote hosts are received.
sfPortscan only generates one alert for each host pair in question during the time window (more on windows below).
On TCP scan alerts, sfPortscan will also display any open ports that were scanned. On TCP sweep alerts however,
sfPortscan will only track open ports after the alert has been triggered. Open port events are not individual alerts, but
tags based on the orginal scan alert.
sfPortscan Configuration
You may want to use the following line in your snort.conf to disable evasion alerts within stream4 because some
scan packets can cause these alerts to be generated:
Use of the Flow preprocessor is required for sfPortscan. Flow gives portscan direction in the case of connectionless
protocols like ICMP and UDP. You should enable the Flow preprocessor in your snort.conf by using the following:
The parameters you can use to configure the portscan module are:
1. proto <protocol>
Available options:
• TCP
• UDP
• IGMP
• ip proto
30
• all
2. scan type <scan type>
Available options:
• portscan
• portsweep
• decoy portscan
• distributed portscan
• all
3. sense level <level>
Available options:
• low - “Low” alerts are only generated on error packets sent from the target host, and because of the nature
of error responses, this setting should see very few false postives. However, this setting will never trigger
a Filtered Scan alert because of a lack of error responses. This setting is based on a static time window of
60 seconds, afterwhich this window is reset.
• medium - “Medium” alerts track connection counts, and so will generate filtered scan alerts. This setting
may false positive on active hosts (NATs, proxies, DNS caches, etc), so the user may need to deploy the
use of Ignore directives to properly tune this directive.
• high - “High” alerts continuously track hosts on a network using a time window to evaluate portscan
statistics for that host. A ”High” setting will catch some slow scans because of the continuous monitoring,
but is very sensitive to active hosts. This most definitely will require the user to tune sfPortscan.
4. watch ip <ip1|ip2/cidr[:[port|port2-port3]]>
Defines which IPs, networks, and specific ports on those hosts to watch. The list is a comma seperated list of
IP addresses, IP address using CIDR notation. Optionally, ports are specified after the IP address/CIDR using a
colon and can be either a single port or a range denoted by a dash. IPs or networks not falling into this range are
ignored if this option is used.
5. ignore scanners <ip list>
Ignores the source of scan alerts. ip list can be a comma seperated list of IP addresses or IP addresses using
CIDR notation.
6. ignore scanned <ip list>
Ignores the destination of scan alerts. ip list can be a comma seperated list of IP addresses or IP addresses
using CIDR notation.
7. logfile <file>
This option will output portscan events to the file specified. If file does not contain a leading slash, this file
will be placed in the Snort config dir.
Format
31
preprocessor flow: stats_interval 0 hash 2
preprocessor sfportscan: proto { all } \
scan_type { all } \
sense_level { low }
Unified Output In order to get all the portscan information logged with the alert, snort generates a pseudo-packet
and uses the payload portion to store the additional portscan information of priority count, connection count, IP count,
port count, IP range, and port range. The characteristics of the packet are:
Other than that, the packet looks like the IP portion of the packet that caused the portscan alert to be generated. This
includes any IP options, etc. The payload and payload size of the packet are equal to the length of the additional
portscan information that is logged. The size tends to be around 100 - 200 bytes.
Open port alerts differ from the other portscan alerts, because open port alerts utilize the tagged packet output system.
This means that if an output system that doesn’t print tagged packets is used, then the user won’t see open port alerts.
The open port information is stored in the IP payload and contains the port that is open.
The sfPortscan alert output was designed to work with unified packet logging, so it is possible to extend favorite Snort
GUIs to display portscan alerts and the additional information in the IP payload using the above packet characteristics.
Log File Output Log file output is displayed in the following format, and explained further below:
Time: 09/08-15:07:31.603880
event_id: 2
192.168.169.3 -> 192.168.169.5 (portscan) TCP Filtered Portscan
Priority Count: 0
Connection Count: 200
IP Count: 2
Scanner IP Range: 192.168.169.3:192.168.169.4
Port/Proto Count: 200
Port/Proto Range: 20:47557
If there are open ports on the target, one or more additional tagged packet(s) will be appended:
Time: 09/08-15:07:31.603881
event_ref: 2
192.168.169.3 -> 192.168.169.5 (portscan) Open Port
Open Port: 38458
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3. Connection Count
Connection Count lists how many connections are active on the hosts (src or dst). This is accurate for
connection-based protocols, and is more of an estimate for others. Whether or not a portscan was filtered is
determined here. High connection count and low priority count would indicate filtered (no response received
from target).
4. IP Count
IP Count keeps track of the last IP to contact a host, and increments the count if the next IP is different. For
one-to-one scans, this is a low number. For active hosts this number will be high regardless, and one-to-one
scans may appear as a distributed scan.
5. Scanned/Scanner IP Range
This field changes depending on the type of alert. Portsweep (one-to-many) scans display the scanned IP range;
Portscans (one-to-one) display the scanner IP.
6. Port Count
Port Count keeps track of the last port contacted and increments this number when that changes. We use this
count (along with IP Count) to determine the difference between one-to-one portscans and one-to-one decoys.
Tuning sfPortscan
The most important aspect in detecting portscans is tuning the detection engine for your network(s). Here are some
tuning tips:
1. Use the watch ip, ignore scanners, and ignore scanned options.
It’s important to correctly set these options. The watch ip option is easy to understand. The analyst should set
this option to the list of Cidr blocks and IPs that they want to watch. If no watch ip is defined, sfPortscan will
watch all network traffic.
The ignore scanners and ignore scanned options come into play in weeding out legitimate hosts that are
very active on your network. Some of the most common examples are NAT IPs, DNS cache servers, syslog
servers, and nfs servers. sfPortscan may not generate false positives for these types of hosts, but be aware when
first tuning sfPortscan for these IPs. Depending on the type of alert that the host generates, the analyst will know
which to ignore it as. If the host is generating portsweep events, then add it to the ignore scanners option.
If the host is generating portscan alerts (and is the host that is being scanned), add it to the ignore scanned
option.
2. Filtered scan alerts are much more prone to false positives.
When determining false positives, the alert type is very important. Most of the false positives that sfPortscan
may generate are of the filtered scan alert type. So be much more suspicious of filtered portscans. Many times
this just indicates that a host was very active during the time period in question. If the host continually generates
these types of alerts, add it to the ignore scanners list or use a lower sensitivity level.
3. Make use of the Priority Count, Connection Count, IP Count, Port Count, IP Range, and Port Range to
determine false positives.
The portscan alert details are vital in determining the scope of a portscan and also the confidence of the portscan.
In the future, we hope to automate much of this analysis in assigning a scope level and confidence level, but
for now the user must manually do this. The easiest way to determine false positives is through simple ratio
estimations. The following is a list of ratios to estimate and the associated values that indicate a legimite scan
and not a false positive.
Connection Count / IP Count: This ratio indicates an estimated average of connections per IP. For portscans,
this ratio should be high, the higher the better. For portsweeps, this ratio should be low.
Port Count / IP Count: This ratio indicates an estimated average of ports connected to per IP. For portscans, this
ratio should be high and indicates that the scanned host’s ports were connected to by fewer IPs. For portsweeps,
this ratio should be low, indicating that the scanning host connected to few ports but on many hosts.
33
Connection Count / Port Count: This ratio indicates an estimated average of connections per port. For
portscans, this ratio should be low. This indicates that each connection was to a different port. For portsweeps,
this ratio should be high. This indicates that there were many connections to the same port.
The reason that Priority Count is not included, is because the priority count is included in the connection
count and the above comparisons take that into consideration. The Priority Count play an important role in
tuning because the higher the priority count the more likely it is a real portscan or portsweep (unless the host is
firewalled).
4. If all else fails, lower the sensitivity level.
If none of these other tuning techniques work or the analyst doesn’t have the time for tuning, lower the sensitivity
level. You get the best protection the higher the sensitivity level, but it’s also important that the portscan detection
engine generate alerts that the analyst will find informative. The low sensitivity level only generates alerts based
on error responses. These responses indicate a portscan and the alerts generated by the low sensitivity level are
highly accurate and require the least tuning. The low sensitivity level does not catch filtered scans; since these
are more prone to false positives.
The telnet decode preprocessor allows Snort to normalize Telnet control protocol characters from the session data.
In Snort 1.9.0 and above, it accepts a list of ports to run on as arguments. Also in 1.9.0, it normalizes into a separate
data buffer from the packet itself so that the raw data may be logged or examined with the rawbytes content modifier.
See section 3.5.3.
By default, telnet decode runs against traffic on ports 21, 23, 25, and 119.
Format
4
! NOTE
The telnet decode preprocessor is being deprecated in the next release in favor of the FTP/Telnet prepro-
cessor. See section 2.1.13.
The rpc decode preprocessor normalizes RPC multiple fragmented records into a single un-fragmented record. It does
this by normalizing the packet into the packet buffer. If stream4 is enabled, it will only process client-side traffic. By
default, it runs against traffic on ports 111 and 32771.
Option Description
alert fragments Alert on any fragmented RPC record.
no alert multiple requests Don’t alert when there are multiple records in one packet.
no alert large fragments Don’t alert when the sum of fragmented records exceeds one packet.
no alert incomplete Don’t alert when a single fragment record exceeds the size of one packet.
34
Format
This preprocessor measures Snort’s real-time and theoretical maximum performance. Whenever this preprocessor is
turned on, it should have an output mode enabled, either “console” which prints statistics to the console window or
“file” with a file name, where statistics get printed to the specified file name. By default, Snort’s real-time statistics
are processed. This includes:
• Time Stamp
• Drop Rate
• Mbits/Sec (wire) [duplicated below for easy comparison with other rates]
• Alerts/Sec
• K-Pkts/Sec (wire) [duplicated below for easy comparison with other rates]
• Avg Bytes/Pkt (wire) [duplicated below for easy comparison with other rates]
• Pat-Matched [percent of data received that Snort processes in pattern matching]
• Syns/Sec
• SynAcks/Sec
• New Sessions Cached/Sec
• Sessions Del fr Cache/Sec
• Current Cached Sessions
• Max Cached Sessions
• Stream Flushes/Sec
• Stream Session Cache Faults
• Stream Session Cache Timeouts
• New Frag Trackers/Sec
• Frag-Completes/Sec
• Frag-Inserts/Sec
• Frag-Deletes/Sec
• Frag-Auto Deletes/Sec [memory DoS protection]
• Frag-Flushes/Sec
• Frag-Current [number of current Frag Trackers]
• Frag-Max [max number of Frag Trackers at any time]
• Frag-Timeouts
• Frag-Faults
35
• Number of CPUs [*** Only if compiled with LINUX SMP ***, the next three appear for each CPU]
• CPU usage (user)
• CPU usage (sys)
• CPU usage (Idle)
• Mbits/Sec (wire) [average mbits of total traffic]
• Mbits/Sec (ipfrag) [average mbits of IP fragmented traffic]
• Mbits/Sec (ipreass) [average mbits Snort injects after IP reassembly]
• Mbits/Sec (tcprebuilt) [average mbits Snort injects after stream4 reassembly]
• Mbits/Sec (applayer) [average mbits seen by rules and protocol decoders]
• Avg Bytes/Pkt (wire)
• Avg Bytes/Pkt (ipfrag)
• Avg Bytes/Pkt (ipreass)
• Avg Bytes/Pkt (tcprebuilt)
• Avg Bytes/Pkt (applayer)
• K-Pkts/Sec (wire)
• K-Pkts/Sec (ipfrag)
• K-Pkts/Sec (ipreass)
• K-Pkts/Sec (tcprebuilt)
• K-Pkts/Sec (applayer)
• Total Packets Received
• Total Packets Dropped (not processed)
• Total Packets Blocked (inline)
• flow - Prints out statistics about the type of traffic and protocol distributions that Snort is seeing. This option
can produce large amounts of output.
• events - Turns on event reporting. This prints out statistics as to the number of signatures that were matched
by the setwise pattern matcher (non-qualified events) and the number of those matches that were verified with
the signature flags (qualified events). This shows the user if there is a problem with the rule set that they are
running.
• max - Turns on the theoretical maximum performance that Snort calculates given the processor speed and current
performance. This is only valid for uniprocessor machines, since many operating systems don’t keep accurate
kernel statistics for multiple CPUs.
• console - Prints statistics at the console. This is enabled by default.
• file - Prints statistics in a comma-delimited format to the file that is specified. Not all statistics are output to
this file. You may also use snortfile which will output into your defined Snort log directory. Both of these
directives can be overridden on the command line with the -Z or --perfmon-file options.
• pktcnt - Adjusts the number of packets to process before checking for the time sample. This boosts perfor-
mance, since checking the time sample reduces Snort’s performance. By default, this is 10000.
36
• time - Represents the number of seconds between intervals.
• accumulate or reset - Defines which type of drop statistics are kept by the operating system. By default,
accumulate is used.
• atexitonly - Dump stats for entire life of Snort.
Examples
HTTP Inspect is a generic HTTP decoder for user applications. Given a data buffer, HTTP Inspect will decode the
buffer, find HTTP fields, and normalize the fields. HTTP Inspect works on both client requests and server responses.
The current version of HTTP Inspect only handles stateless processing. This means that HTTP Inspect looks for HTTP
fields on a packet-by-packet basis, and will be fooled if packets are not reassembled. This works fine when there is
another module handling the reassembly, but there are limitations in analyzing the protocol. Future versions will have
a stateful processing mode which will hook into various reassembly modules.
HTTP Inspect has a very “rich” user configuration. Users can configure individual HTTP servers with a variety of
options, which should allow the user to emulate any type of web server. Within HTTP Inspect, there are two areas of
configuration: global and server.
Global Configuration
The global configuration deals with configuration options that determine the global functioning of HTTP Inspect. The
following example gives the generic global configuration format:
Format
You can only have a single global configuration, you’ll get an error if you try otherwise.
Configuration
37
4
! NOTE
Remember that this configuration is for the global IIS Unicode map, individual servers can reference their
own IIS Unicode map.
Server Configuration
Default This configuration supplies the default server configuration for any server that is not individually configured.
Most of your web servers will most likely end up using the default configuration.
Configuration by IP Address This format is very similar to “default”, the only difference being that specific IPs
can be configured.
Example IP Configuration
Important: Some configuration options have an argument of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This argument specifies whether the user
wants the configuration option to generate an HTTP Inspect alert or not. The ‘yes/no’ argument does not specify
whether the configuration option itself is on or off, only the alerting functionality. In other words, whether set to ‘yes’
or ’no’, HTTP normalization will still occur, and rules based on HTTP traffic will still trigger.
1. profile <all|apache|iis>
Users can configure HTTP Inspect by using pre-defined HTTP server profiles. Profiles allow the user to easily
configure the preprocessor for a certain type of server, but are not required for proper operation.
There are three profiles available: all, apache, and iis.
38
1-A. all
The all profile is meant to normalize the URI using most of the common tricks available. We alert on the
more serious forms of evasions. This is a great profile for detecting all types of attacks, regardless of the
HTTP server. profile all sets the configuration options described in Table 2.6.
1-B. apache
The apache profile is used for Apache web servers. This differs from the iis profile by only accepting
UTF-8 standard Unicode encoding and not accepting backslashes as legitimate slashes, like IIS does.
Apache also accepts tabs as whitespace. profile apache sets the configuration options described in
Table 2.7.
1-C. iis
The iis profile mimics IIS servers. So that means we use IIS Unicode codemaps for each server, %u
encoding, bare-byte encoding, double decoding, backslashes, etc. profile iis sets the configuration
options described in Table 2.8.
The default options used by HTTP Inspect do not use a profile and are described in Table 2.9.
39
Table 2.8: Options for the iis Profile
Option Setting
flow depth 300
chunk encoding alert on chunks larger than 500000 bytes
iis unicode map codepoint map in the global configuration
ascii decoding on, alert off
multiple slash on, alert off
directory normalization on, alert off
webroot on, alert on
double decoding on, alert on
%u decoding on, alert on
bare byte decoding on, alert on
iis unicode codepoints on, alert on
iis backslash on, alert off
iis delimiter on, alert on
apache whitespace on, alert on
non strict URL parsing on
40
Profiles must be specified as the first server option and cannot be combined with any other options except:
• ports
• iis unicode map
• allow proxy use
• flow depth
• no alerts
• inspect uri only
• oversize dir length
These options must be specified after the profile option.
Example
41
7. u encode <yes|no>
This option emulates the IIS %u encoding scheme. How the %u encoding scheme works is as follows: the
encoding scheme is started by a %u followed by 4 characters, like %uxxxx. The xxxx is a hex-encoded value
that correlates to an IIS Unicode codepoint. This value can most definitely be ASCII. An ASCII character is
encoded like %u002f = /, %u002e = ., etc. If no iis unicode map is specified before or after this option, the
default codemap is used.
You should alert on %u encodings, because we are not aware of any legitimate clients that use this encoding. So
it is most likely someone trying to be covert.
8. bare byte <yes|no>
Bare byte encoding is an IIS trick that uses non-ASCII characters as valid values when decoding UTF-8 values.
This is not in the HTTP standard, as all non-ASCII values have to be encoded with a %. Bare byte encoding
allows the user to emulate an IIS server and interpret non-standard encodings correctly.
The alert on this decoding should be enabled, because there are no legitimate clients that encode UTF-8 this
way since it is non-standard.
9. base36 <yes|no>
This is an option to decode base36 encoded chars. This option is based on of info from http://www.yk.rim.or.jp/˜shikap/pat
If %u encoding is enabled, this option will not work. You have to use the base36 option with the utf 8 option.
Don’t use the %u option, because base36 won’t work. When base36 is enabled, ASCII encoding is also enabled
to enforce correct behavior.
10. iis unicode <yes|no>
The iis unicode option turns on the Unicode codepoint mapping. If there is no iis unicode map option spec-
ified with the server config, iis unicode uses the default codemap. The iis unicode option handles the
mapping of non-ASCII codepoints that the IIS server accepts and decodes normal UTF-8 requests.
You should alert on the iis unicode option, because it is seen mainly in attacks and evasion attempts. When
iis unicode is enabled, ASCII and UTF-8 decoding are also enabled to enforce correct decoding. To alert on
UTF-8 decoding, you must enable also enable utf 8 yes.
11. double decode <yes|no> The double decode option is once again IIS-specific and emulates IIS function-
ality. How this works is that IIS does two passes through the request URI, doing decodes in each one. In the
first pass, it seems that all types of iis encoding is done: utf-8 unicode, ascii, bare byte, and %u. In the second
pass, the following encodings are done: ascii, bare byte, and %u. We leave out utf-8 because I think how this
works is that the % encoded utf-8 is decoded to the Unicode byte in the first pass, and then UTF-8 is decoded in
the second stage. Anyway, this is really complex and adds tons of different encodings for one character. When
double decode is enabled, so ASCII is also enabled to enforce correct decoding.
12. non rfc char {<byte> [<byte ...>]}
This option lets users receive an alert if certain non-RFC chars are used in a request URI. For instance, a user
may not want to see null bytes in the request URI and we can alert on that. Please use this option with care,
because you could configure it to say, alert on all ‘/’ or something like that. It’s flexible, so be careful.
13. multi slash <yes|no>
This option normalizes multiple slashes in a row, so something like: “foo/////////bar” get normalized to “foo/bar.”
If you want an alert when multiple slashes are seen, then configure with a yes; otherwise, use no.
14. iis backslash <yes|no>
Normalizes backslashes to slashes. This is again an IIS emulation. So a request URI of “/foo\bar” gets normal-
ized to “/foo/bar.”
15. directory <yes|no>
This option normalizes directory traversals and self-referential directories.
The directory:
/foo/fake\_dir/../bar
42
gets normalized to:
/foo/bar
The directory:
/foo/./bar
/foo/bar
If you want to configure an alert, specify yes, otherwise, specify no. This alert may give false positives, since
some web sites refer to files using directory traversals.
16. apache whitespace <yes|no>
This option deals with the non-RFC standard of using tab for a space delimiter. Apache uses this, so if the
emulated web server is Apache, enable this option. Alerts on this option may be interesting, but may also be
false positive prone.
17. iis delimiter <yes|no>
This started out being IIS-specific, but Apache takes this non-standard delimiter was well. Since this is common,
we always take this as standard since the most popular web servers accept it. But you can still get an alert on
this option.
18. chunk length <non-zero positive integer>
This option is an anomaly detector for abnormally large chunk sizes. This picks up the Apache chunk encoding
exploits, and may also alert on HTTP tunneling that uses chunk encoding.
19. no pipeline req
This option turns HTTP pipeline decoding off, and is a performance enhancement if needed. By default, pipeline
requests are inspected for attacks, but when this option is enabled, pipeline requests are not decoded and ana-
lyzed per HTTP protocol field. It is only inspected with the generic pattern matching.
20. non strict
This option turns on non-strict URI parsing for the broken way in which Apache servers will decode a URI.
Only use this option on servers that will accept URIs like this: ”get /index.html alsjdfk alsj lj aj la jsj s\n”. The
non strict option assumes the URI is between the first and second space even if there is no valid HTTP identifier
after the second space.
21. allow proxy use
By specifying this keyword, the user is allowing proxy use on this server. This means that no alert will be
generated if the proxy alert global keyword has been used. If the proxy alert keyword is not enabled, then
this option does nothing. The allow proxy use keyword is just a way to suppress unauthorized proxy use for
an authorized server.
22. no alerts
This option turns off all alerts that are generated by the HTTP Inspect preprocessor module. This has no effect
on HTTP rules in the rule set. No argument is specified.
23. oversize dir length <non-zero positive integer>
This option takes a non-zero positive integer as an argument. The argument specifies the max char directory
length for URL directory. If a url directory is larger than this argument size, an alert is generated. A good
argument value is 300 characters. This should limit the alerts to IDS evasion type attacks, like whisker -i 4.
43
24. inspect uri only
This is a performance optimization. When enabled, only the URI portion of HTTP requests will be inspected
for attacks. As this field usually contains 90-95% of the web attacks, you’ll catch most of the attacks. So if
you need extra performance, enable this optimization. It’s important to note that if this option is used without
any uricontent rules, then no inspection will take place. This is obvious since the URI is only inspected with
uricontent rules, and if there are none available, then there is nothing to inspect.
For example, if we have the following rule set:
No alert will be generated when inspect uri only is enabled. The inspect uri only configuration turns off
all forms of detection except uricontent inspection.
25. webroot <yes|no>
This option generates an alert when a directory traversal traverses past the web server root directory. This
generates much fewer false positives than the directory option, because it doesn’t alert on directory traversals
that stay within the web server directory structure. It only alerts when the directory traversals go past the web
server root directory, which is associated with certain web attacks.
26. tab uri delimiter
This option turns on the use of the tab character (0x09) as a delimiter for a URI. Apache accepts tab as a
delimiter; IIS does not. For IIS, a tab in the URI should be treated as any other character. Whether this option is
on or not, a tab is treated as whitespace if a space character (0x20) precedes it. No argument is specified.
Examples
44
preprocessor http_inspect_server: server default \
profile all \
ports { 80 8080 }
The SMTP preprocessor is an SMTP decoder for user applications. Given a data buffer, SMTP will decode the buffer
and find SMTP commands and responses. It will also mark the command, data header data body sections, and TLS
data.
SMTP handles stateless and stateful processing. It saves state between individual packets. However maintaining
correct state is dependent on the reassembly of the client side of the stream (ie, a loss of coherent stream data results
in a loss of state).
Configuration
SMTP has the usual configuration items, such as port and inspection type. Also, SMTP command lines can be
normalized to remove extraneous spaces. TLS-encrypted traffic can be ignored, which improves performance. In
addition, regular mail data can be ignored for an additional performance boost. Since so few (none in the current snort
rule set) exploits are against mail data, this is relatively safe to do and can improve the performance of data inspection.
The configuration options are described below:
45
9. alt max command line len <int> { <cmd> [<cmd>] }
Overrides max command line len for specific commands.
10. no alerts
Turn off all alerts for this preprocessor.
11. invalid cmds { <Space-delimited list of commands> }
Alert if this command is sent from client side. Default is an empty list.
12. valid cmds { <Space-delimited list of commands> }
List of valid commands. We do not alert on commands in this list. Default is an empty list, but preprocessor
has this list hard-coded: { ATRN AUTH BDAT DATA DEBUG EHLO EMAL ESAM ESND ESOM ETRN
EVFY EXPN } { HELO HELP IDENT MAIL NOOP QUIT RCPT RSET SAML SOML SEND ONEX QUEU
} { STARTTLS TICK TIME TURN TURNME VERB VRFY X-EXPS X-LINK2STATE } { XADR XAUTH
XCIR XEXCH50 XGEN XLICENSE XQUE XSTA XTRN XUSR }
13. alert unknown cmds
Alert if we don’t recognize command. Default is off.
14. normalize cmds { <Space-delimited list of commands> }
Normalize this list of commands Default is { RCPT VRFY EXPN }.
15. xlink2state { enable | disable [drop] }
Enable/disable xlink2state alert. Drop if alerted. Default is enable.
16. print cmds
List all commands understood by the preprocessor. This not normally printed out with the configuration because
it can print so much data.
Example
preprocessor SMTP: \
ports { 25 } \
inspection_type stateful \
normalize cmds \
normalize_cmds { EXPN VRFY RCPT } \
ignore_data \
ignore_tls_data \
max_command_line_len 512 \
max_header_line_len 1024 \
max_response_line_len 512 \
no_alerts \
alt_max_command_line_len 300 { RCPT } \
invalid_cmds { } \
valid_cmds { } \
xlink2state { disable } \
print_cmds
Default
preprocessor SMTP: \
ports { 25 } \
inspection_type stateful \
normalize cmds \
normalize_cmds { EXPN VRFY RCPT } \
46
alt_max_command_line_len 260 { MAIL } \
alt_max_command_line_len 300 { RCPT } \
alt_max_command_line_len 500 { HELP HELO ETRN } \
alt_max_command_line_len 255 { EXPN VRFY }
Note
RCPT TO: and MAIL FROM: are SMTP commands. For the preprocessor configuration, they are referred to as RCPT
and MAIL, respectively. Within the code, the preprocessor actually maps RCPT and MAIL to the correct command
name.
FTP/Telnet is an improvement to the Telnet decoder and provides stateful inspection capability for both FTP and
Telnet data streams. FTP/Telnet will decode the stream, identifying FTP commands and responses and Telnet escape
sequences and normalize the fields. FTP/Telnet works on both client requests and server responses.
FTP/Telnet has the capability to handle stateless processing, meaning it only looks for information on a packet-by-
packet basis.
The default is to run FTP/Telent in stateful inspection mode, meaning it looks for information and handles reassembled
data correctly.
FTP/Telnet has a very “rich” user configuration, similar to that of HTTP Inspect (See 2.1.11). Users can configure
individual FTP servers and clients with a variety of options, which should allow the user to emulate any type of FTP
server or FTP Client. Within FTP/Telnet, there are four areas of configuration: Global, Telnet, FTP Client, and FTP
Server.
4
! NOTE
Some configuration options have an argument of yes or no. This argument specifies whether the user wants
the configuration option to generate a ftptelnet alert or not. The presence of the option indicates the option
itself is on, while the yes/no argument applies to the alerting functionality associated with that option.
Global Configuration
The global configuration deals with configuration options that determine the global functioning of FTP/Telnet. The
following example gives the generic global configuration format:
Format
You can only have a single global configuration, you’ll get an error if you try otherwise. The FTP/Telnet global
configuration must appear before the other three areas of configuration.
Configuration
1. inspection type
This indicates whether to operate in stateful or stateless mode.
47
2. encrypted traffic <yes|no>
This option enables detection and alerting on encrypted Telnet and FTP command channels.
4
! NOTE
When inspection type is in stateless mode, checks for encrypted traffic will occur on every packet, whereas
in stateful mode, a particular session will be noted as encrypted and not inspected any further.
3. check encrypted
Instructs the the preprocessor to continue to check an encrypted session for a subsequent command to cease
encryption.
Telnet Configuration
The telnet configuration deals with configuration options that determine the functioning of the Telnet portion of the
preprocessor. The following example gives the generic telnet configuration format:
Format
There should only be a single telnet configuration, and subsequent instances will override previously set values.
Configuration
48
FTP Server Configuration
There are two types of FTP server configurations: default and by IP address.
Default This configuration supplies the default server configuration for any FTP server that is not individually con-
figured. Most of your FTP servers will most likely end up using the default configuration.
Configuration by IP Address This format is very similar to “default”, the only difference being that specific IPs
can be configured.
alt_max_param_len 16 { USER }
49
7. cmd validity cmd < fmt >
This option specifies the valid format for parameters of a givven command.
fmt must be enclosed in <>’s and may contain the following:
Value Description
int Parameter must be an integer
number Parameter must be an integer between 1 and 255
char chars Parameter must be a single character, one of chars
date datefmt Parameter follows format specified, where:
# Number
C Character
[] optional format enclosed
| OR
{} choice of options
other literal (ie, . + -)
string Parameter is a string (effectively unrestricted)
host port Parameter must be a host/port specified, per RFC 959
,| One of choices enclosed within, separated by |
[] Optional value enclosed within
Examples of the cmd validity option are shown below. These examples are the default checks, per RFC 959 and
others performed by the preprocessor.
A cmd validity line can be used to override these defaults and/or add a check for other commands.
50
FTP Client Configuration
Similar to the FTP Server configuration, the FTP client configurations has two types: default, and by IP address.
Default This configuration supplies the default client configuration for any FTP client that is not individually con-
figured. Most of your FTP clients will most likely end up using the default configuration.
Configuration by IP Address This format is very similar to “default”, the only difference being that specific IPs
can be configured.
• Allow bounces to 192.162.1.1 port 20020 – ie, the use of PORT 192,168,1,1,78,52.
bounce_to { 192.168.1.1,20020 }
• Allow bounces to 192.162.1.1 ports 20020 through 20040 – ie, the use of PORT 192,168,1,1,78,xx,
where xx is 52 through 72 inclusive.
bounce_to { 192.168.1.1,20020,20040 }
• Allow bounces to 192.162.1.1 port 20020 and 192.168.1.2 port 20030.
bounce_to { 192.168.1.1,20020 192.168.1.2,20030}
51
Examples/Default Configuration from snort.conf
The asn.1 detection plugin decodes a packet or a portion of a packet, and looks for various malicious encodings.
The general configuration of the asn.1 rule option is as follows:
Multiple keywords can be used in an ’asn1’ option and the implied logic is boolean OR. So if any of the arguments
evaluate as true, the whole option evaluates as true.
ASN.1 Keywords
The ASN.1 keywords provide programmatic detection capabilities as well as some more dynamic type detection. Most
of the keywords don’t have arguments as the detection is looking for non-configurable information. If a keyword does
have an argument, the keyword is followed by a comma and the argument is the next word. If a keyword has multiple
arguments, then a comman separates each.
1. bitstring overflow
The bitstring overflow option detects invalid bitstring encodings that are known to be remotely exploitable.
2. double overflow
The double overflow detects a double ASCII encoding that is larger than a standard buffer. This is known to be
an exploitable function in Microsoft, but it is unknown at this time which services may be exploitable.
52
3. oversize length
This detection keyword compares ASN.1 type lengths with the supplied argument. The syntax looks like,
“oversize length 500”. This means that if an ASN.1 type is greater than 500, then this keyword is evaluated as
true. This keyword must have one argument which specifies the length to compare against.
4. absolute offset
This is the absolute offset from the beginning of the packet. For example, if you wanted to decode snmp
packets, you would say “absolute offset, 0”. absolute offset has one argument—the offset value. Offset
may be positive or negative.
5. relative offset
This is the relative offset from the last content match or byte test/jump. relative offset has one argument—
the offset number. So if you wanted to start decoding and ASN.1 sequence right after the content “foo”,
you would specify ’content:"foo"; asn1: bitstring_overflow, relative_offset, 0’. Offset values
may be positive or negative.
ASN.1 Examples
alert udp any any -> any 161 (msg:"Oversize SNMP Length"; \
asn1: oversize_length, 10000, absolute_offset, 0;)
alert tcp any any -> any 80 (msg:"ASN1 Relative Foo"; content:"foo"; \
asn1: bitstring_overflow, print, relative_offset, 0;)
53
2.3.1 alert syslog
This module sends alerts to the syslog facility (much like the -s command line switch). This module also allows the
user to specify the logging facility and priority within the Snort rules file, giving users greater flexibility in logging
alerts.
Available Keywords
Facilities
• log auth
• log authpriv
• log daemon
• log local0
• log local1
• log local2
• log local3
• log local4
• log local5
• log local6
• log local7
• log user
Priorities
• log emerg
• log alert
• log crit
• log err
• log warning
• log notice
• log info
• log debug
Options
• log cons
• log ndelay
• log perror
• log pid
54
Format
4
! NOTE
As WIN32 does not run syslog servers locally by default, a hostname and port can be passed as options. The
default host is 127.0.0.1. The default port is 514.
This will print Snort alerts in a quick one-line format to a specified output file. It is a faster alerting method than full
alerts because it doesn’t need to print all of the packet headers to the output file
Format
This will print Snort alert messages with full packet headers. The alerts will be written in the default logging directory
(/var/log/snort) or in the logging directory specified at the command line.
Inside the logging directory, a directory will be created per IP. These files will be decoded packet dumps of the packets
that triggered the alerts. The creation of these files slows Snort down considerably. This output method is discouraged
for all but the lightest traffic situations.
Format
Sets up a UNIX domain socket and sends alert reports to it. External programs/processes can listen in on this socket
and receive Snort alert and packet data in real time. This is currently an experimental interface.
55
Format
alert_unixsock
output alert_unixsock
The log tcpdump module logs packets to a tcpdump-formatted file. This is useful for performing post-process analysis
on collected traffic with the vast number of tools that are available for examining tcpdump-formatted files. This module
only takes a single argument: the name of the output file. Note that the file name will have the UNIX timestamp in
seconds appended the file name. This is so that data from separate Snort runs can be kept distinct.
Format
2.3.6 database
This module from Jed Pickel sends Snort data to a variety of SQL databases. More information on installing and
configuring this module can be found on the [91]incident.org web page. The arguments to this plugin are the name of
the database to be logged to and a parameter list. Parameters are specified with the format parameter = argument. see
Figure 2.13 for example usage.
Format
host - Host to connect to. If a non-zero-length string is specified, TCP/IP communication is used. Without a host
name, it will connect using a local UNIX domain socket.
port - Port number to connect to at the server host, or socket filename extension for UNIX-domain connections.
dbname - Database name
user - Database username for authentication
password - Password used if the database demands password authentication
sensor name - Specify your own name for this Snort sensor. If you do not specify a name, one will be generated
automatically
encoding - Because the packet payload and option data is binary, there is no one simple and portable way to store it
in a database. Blobs are not used because they are not portable across databases. So i leave the encoding option
to you. You can choose from the following options. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages:
56
hex (default) - Represent binary data as a hex string.
Storage requirements - 2x the size of the binary
Searchability - very good
Human readability - not readable unless you are a true geek, requires post processing
base64 - Represent binary data as a base64 string.
Storage requirements - ∼1.3x the size of the binary
Searchability - impossible without post processing
Human readability - not readable requires post processing
ascii - Represent binary data as an ASCII string. This is the only option where you will actually lose data.
Non-ASCII Data is represented as a ‘.’. If you choose this option, then data for IP and TCP options will
still be represented as hex because it does not make any sense for that data to be ASCII.
Storage requirements - slightly larger than the binary because some characters are escaped (&,<,>)
Searchability - very good for searching for a text string impossible if you want to search for binary
human readability - very good
detail - How much detailed data do you want to store? The options are:
full (default) - Log all details of a packet that caused an alert (including IP/TCP options and the payload)
fast - Log only a minimum amount of data. You severely limit the potential of some analysis applications
if you choose this option, but this is still the best choice for some applications. The following fields are
logged: timestamp, signature, source ip, destination ip, source port, destination port, tcp
flags, and protocol)
Furthermore, there is a logging method and database type that must be defined. There are two logging types available,
log and alert. Setting the type to log attaches the database logging functionality to the log facility within the program.
If you set the type to log, the plugin will be called on the log output chain. Setting the type to alert attaches the plugin
to the alert output chain within the program.
There are five database types available in the current version of the plugin. These are mssql, mysql, postgresql,
oracle, and odbc. Set the type to match the database you are using.
4
! NOTE
The database output plugin does not have the ability to handle alerts that are generated by using the tag
keyword. See section 3.7.5 for more details.
2.3.7 csv
The csv output plugin allows alert data to be written in a format easily importable to a database. The plugin requires
2 arguments: a full pathname to a file and the output formatting option.
The list of formatting options is below. If the formatting option is default, the output is in the order the formatting
option is listed.
• timestamp
• sig generator
• sig id
57
• sig rev
• msg
• proto
• src
• srcport
• dst
• dstport
• ethsrc
• ethdst
• ethlen
• tcpflags
• tcpseq
• tcpack
• tcplen
• tcpwindow
• ttl
• tos
• id
• dgmlen
• iplen
• icmptype
• icmpcode
• icmpid
• icmpseq
Format
58
2.3.8 unified
The unified output plugin is designed to be the fastest possible method of logging Snort events. The unified output
plugin logs events in binary format, allowing another programs to handle complex logging mechanisms that would
otherwise diminish the performance of Snort.
The name unified is a misnomer, as the unified output plugin creates two different files, an alert file, and a log file.
The alert file contains the high-level details of an event (eg: IPs, protocol, port, message id). The log file contains
the detailed packet information (a packet dump with the associated event ID). Both file types are written in a bimary
format described in spo unified.h.
4
! NOTE
Files have the file creation time (in Unix Epoch format) appended to each file when it is created.
Format
output alert_unified: <base file name> [, <limit <file size limit in MB>]
output log_unified: <base file name> [, <limit <file size limit in MB>]
4
! NOTE
support to use alert prelude is not built in by default. To use alert prelude, snort must be built with the
–enable-prelude arguement passed to ./configure.
The alert prelude output plugin is used to log to a Prelude database. For more information on Prelude, see http://www.prelude-ids.or
format
Sometimes it is useful to be able to create rules that will alert to certain types of traffic but will not cause packet log
entries. In Snort 1.8.2, the log null plugin was introduced. This is equivalent to using the -n command line option but
it is able to work within a ruletype.
59
Format
output log_null
ruletype info {
type alert
output alert_fast: info.alert
output log_null
}
4
! NOTE
To use dynamic modules, Snort must be configured with the –enable-dynamicplugin flag.
2.4.1 Format
<directive> <parameters>
2.4.2 Directives
60
Table 2.10: Dynamic Directives
61
Chapter 3
alert tcp any any -> 192.168.1.0/24 111 (content:"|00 01 86 a5|"; msg:"mountd access";)
The text up to the first parenthesis is the rule header and the section enclosed in parenthesis contains the rule options.
The words before the colons in the rule options section are called option keywords.
4
! NOTE
Note that the rule options section is not specifically required by any rule, they are just used for the sake of
making tighter definitions of packets to collect or alert on (or drop, for that matter).
All of the elements in that make up a rule must be true for the indicated rule action to be taken. When taken together,
the elements can be considered to form a logical AND statement. At the same time, the various rules in a Snort rules
library file can be considered to form a large logical OR statement.
62
3.2 Rules Headers
The rule header contains the information that defines the who, where, and what of a packet, as well as what to do in
the event that a packet with all the attributes indicated in the rule should show up. The first item in a rule is the rule
action. The rule action tells Snort what to do when it finds a packet that matches the rule criteria. There are 5 available
default actions in Snort, alert, log, pass, activate, and dynamic. In addition, if you are running Snort in inline mode,
you have additional options which include drop, reject, and sdrop.
1. alert - generate an alert using the selected alert method, and then log the packet
2. log - log the packet
3. pass - ignore the packet
4. activate - alert and then turn on another dynamic rule
5. dynamic - remain idle until activated by an activate rule , then act as a log rule
6. drop - make iptables drop the packet and log the packet
7. reject - make iptables drop the packet, log it, and then send a TCP reset if the protocol is TCP or an ICMP port
unreachable message if the protocol is UDP.
8. sdrop - make iptables drop the packet but does not log it.
You can also define your own rule types and associate one or more output plugins with them. You can then use the
rule types as actions in Snort rules.
This example will create a type that will log to just tcpdump:
ruletype suspicious
{
type log
output log_tcpdump: suspicious.log
}
This example will create a rule type that will log to syslog and a MySQL database:
ruletype redalert
{
type alert
output alert_syslog: LOG_AUTH LOG_ALERT
output database: log, mysql, user=snort dbname=snort host=localhost
}
3.2.2 Protocols
The next field in a rule is the protocol. There are four protocols that Snort currently analyzes for suspicious behavior
– TCP, UDP, ICMP, and IP. In the future there may be more, such as ARP, IGRP, GRE, OSPF, RIP, IPX, etc.
63
3.2.3 IP Addresses
The next portion of the rule header deals with the IP address and port information for a given rule. The keyword any
may be used to define any address. Snort does not have a mechanism to provide host name lookup for the IP address
fields in the rules file. The addresses are formed by a straight numeric IP address and a CIDR[3] block. The CIDR
block indicates the netmask that should be applied to the rule’s address and any incoming packets that are tested against
the rule. A CIDR block mask of /24 indicates a Class C network, /16 a Class B network, and /32 indicates a specific
machine address. For example, the address/CIDR combination 192.168.1.0/24 would signify the block of addresses
from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.255. Any rule that used this designation for, say, the destination address would match
on any address in that range. The CIDR designations give us a nice short-hand way to designate large address spaces
with just a few characters.
In Figure 3.1, the source IP address was set to match for any computer talking, and the destination address was set to
match on the 192.168.1.0 Class C network.
There is an operator that can be applied to IP addresses, the negation operator. This operator tells Snort to match any
IP address except the one indicated by the listed IP address. The negation operator is indicated with a !. For example,
an easy modification to the initial example is to make it alert on any traffic that originates outside of the local net with
the negation operator as shown in Figure 3.2.
This rule’s IP addresses indicate any tcp packet with a source IP address not originating from the internal network and
a destination address on the internal network.
You may also specify lists of IP addresses. An IP list is specified by enclosing a comma separated list of IP addresses
and CIDR blocks within square brackets. For the time being, the IP list may not include spaces between the addresses.
See Figure 3.3 for an example of an IP list in action.
Port numbers may be specified in a number of ways, including any ports, static port definitions, ranges, and by
negation. Any ports are a wildcard value, meaning literally any port. Static ports are indicated by a single port
number, such as 111 for portmapper, 23 for telnet, or 80 for http, etc. Port ranges are indicated with the range operator
:. The range operator may be applied in a number of ways to take on different meanings, such as in Figure 3.4.
Port negation is indicated by using the negation operator !. The negation operator may be applied against any of the
other rule types (except any, which would translate to none, how Zen...). For example, if for some twisted reason you
wanted to log everything except the X Windows ports, you could do something like the rule in Figure 3.5.
64
log udp any any -> 192.168.1.0/24 1:1024 log udp
traffic coming from any port and destination ports ranging from 1 to 1024
log tcp traffic from any port going to ports less than or equal to 6000
log tcp traffic from privileged ports less than or equal to 1024 going to ports greater than or equal to 500
65
3.2.5 The Direction Operator
The direction operator -> indicates the orientation, or direction, of the traffic that the rule applies to. The IP address
and port numbers on the left side of the direction operator is considered to be the traffic coming from the source
host, and the address and port information on the right side of the operator is the destination host. There is also a
bidirectional operator, which is indicated with a <> symbol. This tells Snort to consider the address/port pairs in
either the source or destination orientation. This is handy for recording/analyzing both sides of a conversation, such as
telnet or POP3 sessions. An example of the bidirectional operator being used to record both sides of a telnet session is
shown in Figure 3.6.
Also, note that there is no <- operator. In Snort versions before 1.8.7, the direction operator did not have proper
error checking and many people used an invalid token. The reason the <- does not exist is so that rules always read
consistently.
4
! NOTE
Activate and Dynamic rules are being phased out in favor of a combination of tagging (3.7.5) and flowbits
(3.6.10).
Activate/dynamic rule pairs give Snort a powerful capability. You can now have one rule activate another when it’s
action is performed for a set number of packets. This is very useful if you want to set Snort up to perform follow on
recording when a specific rule goes off. Activate rules act just like alert rules, except they have a *required* option
field: activates. Dynamic rules act just like log rules, but they have a different option field: activated by. Dynamic
rules have a second required field as well, count.
Activate rules are just like alerts but also tell Snort to add a rule when a specific network event occurs. Dynamic rules
are just like log rules except are dynamically enabled when the activate rule id goes off.
Put ’em together and they look like Figure 3.7.
These rules tell Snort to alert when it detects an IMAP buffer overflow and collect the next 50 packets headed for port
143 coming from outside $HOME NET headed to $HOME NET. If the buffer overflow happened and was successful,
there’s a very good possibility that useful data will be contained within the next 50 (or whatever) packets going to that
same service port on the network, so there’s value in collecting those packets for later analysis.
66
3.3 Rule Options
Rule options form the heart of Snort’s intrusion detection engine, combining ease of use with power and flexibility. All
Snort rule options are separated from each other using the semicolon (;) character. Rule option keywords are separated
from their arguments with a colon (:) character.
There are four major categories of rule options.
meta-data These options provide information about the rule but do not have any affect during detection
payload These options all look for data inside the packet payload and can be inter-related
non-payload These options look for non-payload data
post-detection These options are rule specific triggers that happen after a rule has “fired.”
3.4.1 msg
The msg rule option tells the logging and alerting engine the message to print along with a packet dump or to an alert.
It is a simple text string that utilizes the \ as an escape character to indicate a discrete character that might otherwise
confuse Snort’s rules parser (such as the semi-colon ; character).
Format
3.4.2 reference
The reference keyword allows rules to include references to external attack identification systems. The plugin currently
supports several specific systems as well as unique URLs. This plugin is to be used by output plugins to provide a link
to additional information about the alert produced.
Make sure to also take a look at http://www.snort.org/pub-bin/sigs-search.cgi/ for a system that is indexing
descriptions of alerts based on of the sid (See Section 3.4.3).
Format
67
alert tcp any any -> any 7070 (msg:"IDS411/dos-realaudio"; \
flags:AP; content:"|fff4 fffd 06|"; reference:arachnids,IDS411;)
3.4.3 sid
The sid keyword is used to uniquely identify Snort rules. This information allows output plugins to identify rules
easily. This option should be used with the rev keyword. (See section 3.4.4)
The file sid-msg.map contains a mapping of alert messages to Snort rule IDs. This information is useful when post-
processing alert to map an ID to an alert message.
Format
Example
3.4.4 rev
The sid keyword is used to uniquely identify revisions of Snort rules. Revisions, along with Snort rule id’s, allow
signatures and descriptions to be refined and replaced with updated information. This option should be used with the
sid keyword. (See section 3.4.3)
Format
Example
68
3.4.5 classtype
The classtype keyword categorizes alerts to be attack classes. By using the and prioritized. The user can specify what
priority each type of rule classification has. Rules that have a classification will have a default priority set.
Format
Rule classifications are defined in the classification.config file. The config file uses the following syntax:
The standard classifications included with Snort are listed in Table 3.2. The standard classifications are ordered with 3
default priorities currently. A priority 1 is the most severe priority level of the default rule set and 4 is the least severe.
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alert tcp any any -> any 80 (msg:"EXPLOIT ntpdx overflow"; \
dsize: >128; classtype:attempted-admin; priority:10 );
alert tcp any any -> any 25 (msg:"SMTP expn root"; flags:A+; \
content:"expn root"; nocase; classtype:attempted-recon;)
Warnings
classtype uses classifications defined by the classification config option. The classifications used by the rules provided
with Snort are defined in etc/classification.config
3.4.6 Priority
The priority tag assigns a severity level to rules. A classtype rule assigns a default priority that may be overridden with
a priority rule. For an example in conjunction with a classification rule refer to Figure 3.9. For use by itself, see Figure
3.10
Format
alert TCP any any -> any 80 (msg: "WEB-MISC phf attempt"; flags:A+; \
content: "/cgi-bin/phf"; priority:10;)
3.5.1 content
The content keyword is one of the more important features of Snort. It allows the user to set rules that search for
specific content in the packet payload and trigger response based on that data. Whenever a content option pattern
match is performed, the Boyer-Moore pattern match function is called and the (rather computationally expensive) test
is performed against the packet contents. If data exactly matching the argument data string is contained anywhere
within the packet’s payload, the test is successful and the remainder of the rule option tests are performed. Be aware
that this test is case sensitive.
The option data for the content keyword is somewhat complex; it can contain mixed text and binary data. The binary
data is generally enclosed within the pipe (|) character and represented as bytecode. Bytecode represents binary data
as hexadecimal numbers and is a good shorthand method for describing complex binary data. Figure 3.11 contains an
example of mixed text and binary data in a Snort rule.
Note that multiple content rules can be specified in one rule. This allows rules to be tailored for less false positives.
If the rule is preceded by a !, the alert will be triggered on packets that do not contain this content. This is useful when
writing rules that want to alert on packets that do not match a certain pattern
4
! NOTE
Also note that the following characters must be escaped inside a content rule:
: ; \ "
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Format
Example
alert tcp any any -> any 139 (content:"|5c 00|P|00|I|00|P|00|E|00 5c|";)
The content keyword has a number of modifier keywords. The modifier keywords change how the previously speci-
fied content works. These modifier keywords are:
1. depth
2. offset
3. distance
4. within
5. nocase
6. rawbytes
3.5.2 nocase
The nocase keyword allows the rule writer to specify that the Snort should look for the specific pattern, ignoring case.
nocase modifies the previous ’content’ keyword in the rule.
Format
nocase;
Example
alert tcp any any -> any 21 (msg:"FTP ROOT"; content:"USER root"; nocase;)
3.5.3 rawbytes
The rawbytes keyword allows rules to look at the raw packet data, ignoring any decoding that was done by preproces-
sors. This acts as a modifier to the previous content 3.5.1 option.
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format
rawbytes;
Example
This example tells the content pattern matcher to look at the raw traffic, instead of the decoded traffic provided by the
Telnet decoder.
alert tcp any any -> any 21 (msg: "Telnet NOP"; content: "|FF F1|"; rawbytes;)
3.5.4 depth
The depth keyword allows the rule writer to specify how far into a packet Snort should search for the specified pattern.
depth modifies the previous ‘content’ keyword in the rule.
A depth of 5 would tell Snort to only look look for the specified pattern within the first 5 bytes of the payload.
As the depth keyword is a modifier to the previous ‘content’ keyword, there must be a content in the rule before ‘depth’
is specified.
See Figure 3.14 for an example of a combined content, offset, and depth search rule.
Format
depth: <number>;
3.5.5 offset
The offset keyword allows the rule writer to specify where to start searching for a pattern within a packet. offset
modifies the previous ’content’ keyword in the rule.
An offset of 5 would tell Snort to start looking for the specified pattern after the first 5 bytes of the payload.
As this keyword is a modifier to the previous ’content’ keyword, there must be a content in the rule before ’offset’ is
specified.
See Figure 3.14 for an example of a combined content, offset, and depth search rule.
Format
offset: <number>;
alert tcp any any -> any 80 (content: "cgi-bin/phf"; offset:4; depth:20;)
Figure 3.14: Combined Content, Offset and Depth Rule. Skip the first 4 bytes, and look for cgi-bin/phf in the next 20
bytes
3.5.6 distance
The distance keyword allows the rule writer to specify how far into a packet Snort should ignore before starting to
search for the specified pattern relative to the end of the previous pattern match.
This can be thought of as exactly the same thing as depth (See Section 3.5.5), except it is relative to the end of the last
pattern match instead of the beginning of the packet.
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Format
Example
alert tcp any any -> any any (content:"ABC"; content: "DEF"; distance:1;)
3.5.7 within
The within keyword is a content modifier that makes sure that at most N bytes are between pattern matches using the
Content ( See Section 3.5.1 ). It’s designed to be used in conjunction with the distance (Section 3.5.6) rule option.
The rule listed in Figure 3.16 constrains the search to not go past 10 bytes past the ABCDE match.
Format
Examples
alert tcp any any -> any any (content:"ABC"; content: "EFG"; within:10;)
3.5.8 uricontent
The uricontent parameter in the Snort rule language searches the NORMALIZED request URI field. This means
that if you are writing rules that include things that are normalized, such as %2f or directory traversals, these rules will
not alert. The reason is that the things you are looking for are normalized out of the URI buffer.
For example, the URI:
/scripts/..%c0%af../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+ver
/winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+ver
/cgi-bin/phf?
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When writing a uricontent rule, write the content that you want to find in the context that the URI will be normalized.
For example, if Snort normalizes directory traversals, do not include directory traversals.
You can write rules that look for the non-normalized content by using the content option. (See Section 3.5.1)
For a description of the parameters to this function, see the content rule options in Section 3.5.1.
This option works in conjunction with the HTTP Inspect preprocessor specified in Section 2.1.11.
Format
uricontent:[!]<content string>;
3.5.9 isdataat
Verify that the payload has data at a specified location, optionally looking for data relative to the end of the previous
content match.
Format
isdataat:<int>[,relative];
Example
This rule looks for the string PASS exists in the packet, then verifies there is at least 50 bytes after the end of the string
PASS, then verifies that there is not a newline character within 50 bytes of the end of the PASS string.
3.5.10 pcre
The pcre keyword allows rules to be written using perl compatible regular expressions. For more detail on what can
be done via a pcre regular expression, check out the PCRE web site http://www.pcre.org
Format
pcre:[!]"(/<regex>/|m<delim><regex><delim>)[ismxAEGRUB]";
The post-re modifiers set compile time flags for the regular expression.
i case insensitive
s include newlines in the dot metacharacter
m By default, the string is treated as one big line of characters. ˆ
and $ match at the beginning and ending of the string. When
m is set, ˆ and $ match immediately following or immediately
before any newline in the buffer, as well as the very start and
very end of the buffer.
x whitespace data characters in the pattern are ignored except
when escaped or inside a character class
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Table 3.4: PCRE compatible modifiers
A the pattern must match only at the start of the buffer (same as ˆ
)
E Set $ to match only at the end of the subject string. Without E,
$ also matches immediately before the final character if it is a
newline (but not before any other newlines).
G Inverts the ”greediness” of the quantifiers so that they are not
greedy by default, but become greedy if followed by ”?”.
Example
This example performs a case-insensitive search for the string BLAH in the payload.
4
! NOTE
Snort’s handling of multiple URIs with PCRE does not work as expected. PCRE when used without a
uricontent only evaluates the first URI. In order to use pcre to inspect all URIs, you must use either a
content or a uricontent.
Test a byte field against a specific value (with operator). Capable of testing binary values or converting representative
byte strings to their binary equivalent and testing them.
For a more detailed explanation, please read Section 3.11.5.
Format
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Option Description
bytes to convert Number of bytes to pick up from the packet
operator Operation to perform to test the value:
• < - less than
• > - greater than
• = - equal
• ! - not
• & - bitwise AND
• -̂ bitwise OR
Any of the operators can also include ! to check if the operator is not true. If ! is specified without an operator, then
the operator is set to =.
4
! NOTE
Snort uses the C operators for each of these operators. If the & operator is used, then it would be the same as
using if (data & value) { do something();}
The byte jump option allows rules to be written for length encoded protocols trivially. By having an option that reads
the length of a portion of data, then skips that far forward in the packet, rules can be written that skip over specific
portions of length-encoded protocols and perform detection in very specific locations.
The byte jump option does this by reading some number of bytes, convert them to their numeric representation, move
that many bytes forward and set a pointer for later detection. This pointer is known as the detect offset end pointer, or
doe ptr.
For a more detailed explanation, please read Section 3.11.5.
Format
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alert udp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> $HOME_NET any \
(msg:"AMD procedure 7 plog overflow "; \
content: "|00 04 93 F3|"; \
content: "|00 00 00 07|"; distance: 4; within: 4; \
byte_test: 4,>, 1000, 20, relative;)
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Option Description
bytes to convert Number of bytes to pick up from the packet
offset Number of bytes into the payload to start processing
relative Use an offset relative to last pattern match
multiplier <value> Multiply the number of calculated bytes by <value> and skip forward that number of
bytes.
big Process data as big endian (default)
little Process data as little endian
string Data is stored in string format in packet
hex Converted string data is represented in hexadecimal
dec Converted string data is represented in decimal
oct Converted string data is represented in octal
align Round the number of converted bytes up to the next 32-bit boundary
from beginning Skip forward from the beginning of the packet payload instead of from the current position
in the packet.
alert udp any any -> any 32770:34000 (content: "|00 01 86 B8|"; \
content: "|00 00 00 01|"; distance: 4; within: 4; \
byte_jump: 4, 12, relative, align; \
byte_test: 4, >, 900, 20, relative; \
msg: "statd format string buffer overflow";)
3.5.13 ftpbounce
Format
ftpbounce;
Example
alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> $HOME_NET 21 (msg:"FTP PORT bounce attempt"; \
flow:to_server,established; content:"PORT"; nocase; ftpbounce; pcre:"/ˆPORT/smi";\
classtype:misc-attack; sid:3441; rev:1;)
3.5.14 regex
The regex keyword has been superceded by PCRE. See Section 3.5.10.
3.5.15 content-list
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3.6 Non-Payload Detection Rule Options
3.6.1 fragoffset
The fragoffset keyword allows one to compare the IP fragment offset field against a decimal value. To catch all the first
fragments of an IP session, you could use the fragbits keyword and look for the More fragments option in conjunction
with a fragoffset of 0.
Format
fragoffset:[<|>]<number>
3.6.2 ttl
The ttl keyword is used to check the IP time-to-live value. This option keyword was intended for use in the detection
of traceroute attempts.
Format
ttl:[[<number>-]><=]<number>;
Example
ttl:<3;
ttl:3-5;
3.6.3 tos
The tos keyword is used to check the IP TOS field for a specific value.
Format
tos:[!]<number>;
Example
tos:!4;
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3.6.4 id
The id keyword is used to check the IP ID field for a specific value. Some tools (exploits, scanners and other odd
programs) set this field specifically for various purposes, for example, the value 31337 is very popular with some
hackers.
Format
id:<number>;
Example
id:31337;
3.6.5 ipopts
rr - Record route
eol - End of list
nop - No op
ts - Time Stamp
sec - IP security option
lsrr - Loose source routing
ssrr - Strict source routing
satid - Stream identifier
any - any IP options are set
The most frequently watched for IP options are strict and loose source routing which aren’t used in any widespread
internet applications.
Format
ipopts:<rr|eol|nop|ts|sec|lsrr|ssrr|satid|any>;
Example
ipopts:lsrr;
Warning
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3.6.6 fragbits
The fragbits keyword is used to check if fragmentation and reserved bits are set in the IP header.
The following bits may be checked:
M - More Fragments
D - Don’t Fragment
R - Reserved Bit
Format
fragbits:[+*!]<[MDR]>
Example
This example checks if the More Fragments bit and the Do not Fragment bit are set.
fragbits:MD+;
3.6.7 dsize
The dsize keyword is used to test the packet payload size. This may be used to check for abnormally sized packets. In
many cases, it is useful for detecting buffer overflows.
Format
dsize: [<>]<number>[<><number>];
Example
This example looks for a dsize that is between 300 and 400 bytes.
dsize:300<>400;
Warning
dsize will fail on stream rebuilt packets, regardless of the size of the payload.
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3.6.8 flags
The flags keyword is used to check if specific TCP flag bits are present.
The following bits may be checked:
To handle writing rules for session initiation packets such as ECN where a SYN packet is sent with the previously
reserved bits 1 and 2 set, an option mask may be specified. A rule could check for a flags value of S,12 if one wishes
to find packets with just the syn bit, regardless of the values of the reserved bits.
Format
flags:[!|*|+]<FSRPAU120>[,<FSRPAU120>];
Example
This example checks if just the SYN and the FIN bits are set, ignoring reserved bit 1 and reserved bit 2.
3.6.9 flow
The flow rule option is used in conjunction with TCP stream reassembly (see Section 2.1.3). It allows rules to only
apply to certain directions of the traffic flow.
This allows rules to only apply to clients or servers. This allows packets related to $HOME NET clients viewing web
pages to be distinguished from servers running the $HOME NET.
The established keyword will replace the flags: A+ used in many places to show established TCP connections.
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Options
Option Description
to client Trigger on server responses from A to B
to server Trigger on client requests from A to B
from client Trigger on client requests from A to B
from server Trigger on server responses from A to B
established Trigger only on established TCP connections
stateless Trigger regardless of the state of the stream processor (useful for packets that are designed
to cause machines to crash)
no stream Do not trigger on rebuilt stream packets (useful for dsize and stream4)
only stream Only trigger on rebuilt stream packets
Format
flow: [(established|stateless)]
[,(to_client|to_server|from_client|from_server)]
[,(no_stream|only_stream)]
3.6.10 flowbits
The flowbits rule option is used in conjunction with conversation tracking from the Flow preprocessor (see Section2.1.4).
It allows rules to track states across transport protocol sessions. The flowbits option is most useful for TCP sessions,
as it allows rules to generically track the state of an application protocol.
There are seven keywords associated with flowbits. Most of the options need a user-defined name for the specific
state that is being checked. This string should be limited to any alphanumeric string including periods, dashes, and
underscores.
Option Description
set Sets the specified state for the current flow.
unset Unsets the specified state for the current flow.
toggle Sets the specified state if the state is unset, otherwise unsets the state if the state is set.
isset Checks if the specified state is set.
isnotset Checks if the specified state is not set.
noalert Cause the rule to not generate an alert, regardless of the rest of the detection options.
Format
flowbits: [set|unset|toggle|isset,reset,noalert][,<STATE_NAME>];
3.6.11 seq
The seq keyword is used to check for a specific TCP sequence number.
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alert tcp any 143 -> any any (msg:"IMAP login";
content:"OK LOGIN"; flowbits:set,logged_in;
flowbits:noalert;)
alert tcp any any -> any 143 (msg:"IMAP LIST"; content:"LIST";
flowbits:isset,logged_in;)
Format
seq:<number>;
Example
seq:0;
3.6.12 ack
The ack keyword is used to check for a specific TCP acknowledge number.
Format
ack: <number>;
Example
ack:0;
3.6.13 window
The window keyword is used to check for a specific TCP window size.
Format
window:[!]<number>;
Example
window:55808;
3.6.14 itype
The itype keyword is used to check for a specific ICMP type value.
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Format
itype:[<|>]<number>[<><number>];
Example
itype:>30;
3.6.15 icode
The itype keyword is used to check for a specific ICMP code value.
Format
icode: [<|>]<number>[<><number>];
Example
code:>30;
3.6.16 icmp id
Format
icmp_id:<number>;
Example
icmp_id:0;
The itype keyword is used to check for a specific ICMP sequence value.
This is useful because some covert channel programs use static ICMP fields when they communicate. This particular
plugin was developed to detect the stacheldraht DDoS agent.
Format
icmp_seq: <number>;
85
Example
icmp_seq:0;
3.6.18 rpc
The rpc keyword is used to check for a RPC application, version, and procedure numbers in SUNRPC CALL requests.
Wildcards are valid for both version and procedure numbers by using ’*’;
Format
Example
Warning
Because of the fast pattern matching engine, the RPC keyword is slower than looking for the RPC values by using
normal content matching.
3.6.19 ip proto
The ip proto keyword allows checks against the IP protocol header. For a list of protocols that may be specified by
name, see /etc/protocols.
Format
Example
3.6.20 sameip
The sameip keyword allows rules to check if the source ip is the same as the destination IP.
Format
sameip;
86
Example
This example looks for any traffic where the Source IP and the Destination IP is the same.
3.7.1 logto
The logto option tells Snort to log all packets that trigger this rule to a special output log file. This is especially handy
for combining data from things like NMAP activity, HTTP CGI scans, etc. It should be noted that this option does not
work when Snort is in binary logging mode.
Format
logto:"filename";
3.7.2 session
The session keyword is built to extract user data from TCP Sessions. There are many cases where seeing what users
are typing in telnet, rlogin, ftp, or even web sessions is very useful.
There are two available argument keywords for the session rule option, printable or all. The printable keyword only
prints out data that the user would normally see or be able to type.
The all keyword substitutes non-printable characters with their hexadecimal equivalents.
Format
session: [printable|all];
Example
Warnings
Using the session keyword can slow Snort down considerably, so it should not be used in heavy load situations. The
session keyword is best suited for post-processing binary (pcap) log files.
3.7.3 resp
The resp keyword is used attempt to close sessions when an alert is triggered. In Snort, this is called flexible response.
Flexible Response supports the following mechanisms for attempting to close sessions:
87
Option Description
rst snd Send TCP-RST packets to the sending socket
rst rcv Send TCP-RST packets to the receiving socket
rst all Send TCP RST packets in both directions
icmp net Send a ICMP NET UNREACH to the sender
icmp host Send a ICMP HOST UNREACH to the sender
icmp port Send a ICMP PORT UNREACH to the sender
icmp all Send all above ICMP packets to the sender
These options can be combined to send multiple responses to the target host.
Format
resp: <resp_mechanism>[,<resp_mechanism>[,<resp_mechanism>]];
Warnings
This functionality is not built in by default. Use the – –enable-flexresp flag to configure when building Snort to enable
this functionality.
Be very careful when using Flexible Response. It is quite easy to get Snort into an infinite loop by defining a rule such
as:
Example
The following example attempts to reset any TCP connection to port 1524.
3.7.4 react
This keyword implements an ability for users to react to traffic that matches a Snort rule. The basic reaction is blocking
interesting sites users want to access: New York Times, slashdot, or something really important - napster and porn
sites. The React code allows Snort to actively close offending connections and/or send a visible notice to the browser.
The notice may include your own comment. The following arguments (basic modifiers) are valid for this option:
The basic argument may be combined with the following arguments (additional modifiers):
• msg - include the msg option text into the blocking visible notice
• proxy: <port nr> - use the proxy port to send the visible notice (will be available soon)
Multiple additional arguments are separated by a comma. The react keyword should be placed as the last one in the
option list.
88
alert tcp any any <> 192.168.1.0/24 80 (content: "bad.htm"; \
msg: "Not for children!"; react: block, msg;)
Format
Warnings
React functionality is not built in by default. This code is currently bundled under Flexible Response, so enabling
Flexible Response (–enable-flexresp) will also enable React.
Be very careful when using react. Causing a network traffic generation loop is very easy to do with this functionality.
3.7.5 tag
The tag keyword allow rules to log more than just the single packet that triggered the rule. Once a rule is triggered,
additional traffic involving the source and/or destination host is tagged. Tagged traffic is logged to allow analysis of
response codes and post-attack traffic. tagged alerts will be sent to the same output plugins as the original alert, but it
is the responsibility of the output plugin to properly handle these special alerts. Currently, the database output plugin,
described in Section 2.3.6, does not properly handle tagged alerts.
Format
type
• session - Log packets in the session that set off the rule
• host - Log packets from the host that caused the tag to activate (uses [direction] modifier)
count - Count is specified as a number of units. Units are specified in the <metric> field.
metric
• packets - Tag the host/session for <count> packets
• seconds - Tag the host/session for <count> seconds
Note, any packets that generate an alert will not be tagged. For example, it may seem that the following rule will tag
the first 600 seconds of any packet involving 10.1.1.1.
However, since the rule will fire on every packet involving 10.1.1.1, no packets will get tagged. The flowbits option
would be useful here.
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Example
• limit
Alerts on the 1st m events during the time interval, then ignores events for the rest of the time interval.
• threshold
Alerts every m times we see this event during the time interval.
• both
Alerts once per time interval after seeing m occurrences of the event, then ignores any additional events during
the time interval.
Thresholding commands can be included as part of a rule, or you can use standalone threshold commands that refer-
ence the generator and SID they are applied to. There is no functional difference between adding a threshold to a rule,
or using a separate threshold command applied to the same rule. There is a logical difference. Some rules may only
make sense with a threshold. These should incorporate the threshold command into the rule. For instance, a rule for
detecting a too many login password attempts may require more than 5 attempts. This can be done using the ‘limit’
type of threshold command. It makes sense that the threshold feature is an integral part of this rule.
In order for rule thresholds to apply properly, these rules must contain a SID.
Only one threshold may be applied to any given generator and SID pair. If more than one threshold is applied to a
generator and SID pair, Snort will terminate with an error while reading the configuration information.
This format supports 6 threshold options as described in Table 3.6—all are required.
Option Arguments
gen id <generator ID>
sig id <Snort signature ID>
type limit, threshold, or both
track by src or by dst
count <number of events>
seconds <time period over which count is accrued>
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3.8.2 Standalone Format
This format supports 4 threshold options as described in Table 3.7—all are required.
Option Arguments
type limit, threshold, or both
track by src or by dst
count <number of events>
seconds <time period over which count is accrued>
For either standalone or rule format, all tracking is by src or by dst ip, ports or anything else are not tracked.
Thresholding can also be used globally, this allows you to specify a threshold for every rule. Standard thresholding
tests are applied first to an event, if they do not block a rule from being logged, and then the global thresholding test is
applied—thresholds in a rule will override a global threshold. Global thresholds do not override what’s in a signature
or a more specific stand-alone threshold.
The global threshold options are the same as the standard threshold options with the exception of the ‘sig id’ field.
The sig id field must be set to 0 to indicate that this threshold command applies to all sig id values with the specified
gen id. To apply the same threshold to all gen id’s at the same time, and with just one command specify a value of
gen id=0.
The format for global threshold commands is as such:
91
3.8.5 Examples
Standalone Thresholds
Limit logging to just 1 event per 60 seconds, but only if we exceed 30 events in 60 seconds:
Rule Thresholds
This rule logs the first event of this SID every 60 seconds.
This rule logs every 10th event on this SID during a 60 second interval. So if less than 10 events occur in 60 seconds,
nothing gets logged. Once an event is logged, a new time period starts for type=threshold.
This rule logs at most one event every 60 seconds if at least 10 events on this SID are fired.
Global Thresholds
Limit to logging 1 event per 60 seconds per IP triggering each rule (rule gen id is 1):
92
Limit to logging 1 event per 60 seconds per IP, triggering each rule for each event generator:
Events in Snort are generated in the usual way, thresholding is handled as part of the output system. Read gen-msg.map
for details on gen ids.
Users can also configure a memcap for threshold with a “config:” option:
93
3.9 Event Suppression
Event suppression stops specified events from firing without removing the rule from the rule base. Suppression uses
a CIDR block notation to select specific networks and users for suppression. Suppression tests are performed prior to
either standard or global thresholding tests.
Suppression commands are standalone commands that reference generators, SIDs, and IP addresses via a CIDR block.
This allows a rule to be completely suppressed, or suppressed when the causative traffic is going to or coming from a
specific IP or group of IP addresses.
You may apply multiple suppression commands to a SID. You may also combine one threshold command and several
suppression commands to the same SID.
3.9.1 Format
3.9.2 Examples
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3.10 Snort Multi-Event Logging (Event Queue)
Snort supports logging multiple events per packet/stream that are prioritized with different insertion methods, such as
max content length or event ordering using the event queue.
The general configuration of the event queue is as follows:
There are three configuration options to the configuration parameter ’event queue’.
1. max queue
This determines the maximum size of the event queue. For example, if the event queue has a max size of 8, only
8 events will be stored for a single packet or stream.
The default value is 8.
2. log
This determines the number of events to log for a given packet or stream. You can’t log more than the max event
number that was specified.
The default value is 3.
3. order events
This argument determines the way that the incoming events are ordered. We currently have two different meth-
ods:
• priority - The highest priority (1 being the highest) events are ordered first.
• content length - Rules are ordered before decode or preprocessor alerts, and rules that have a longer
content are ordered before rules with shorter contents.
The method in which events are ordered does not affect rule types such as pass, alert, log, etc.
The default value is content length.
Use the default event queue values, but change event order:
Use the default event queue values but change the number of logged events:
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3.11 Writing Good Rules
There are some general concepts to keep in mind when developing Snort rules to maximize efficiency and speed.
The 2.0 detection engine changes the way Snort works slightly by having the first phase be a setwise pattern match.
The longer a content option is, the more exact the match. Rules without content (or uricontent) slow the entire system
down.
While some detection options, such as pcre and byte test, perform detection in the payload section of the packet, they
do not use the setwise pattern matching engine. If at all possible, try and have at least one content option if at all
possible.
Try to write rules that target the vulnerability, instead of a specific exploit.
For example, look for a the vulnerable command with an argument that is too large, instead of shellcode that binds a
shell.
By writing rules for the vulnerability, the rule is less vulnerable to evasion when an attacker changes the exploit
slightly.
Many services typically send the commands in upper case letters. FTP is a good example. In FTP, to send the
username, the client sends:
user username_here
A simple rule to look for FTP root login attempts could be:
While it may seem trivial to write a rule that looks for the username root, a good rule will handle all of the odd things
that the protocol might handle when accepting the user command.
For example, each of the following are accepted by most FTP servers:
user root
user root
user root
user root
user<tab>root
To handle all of the cases that the FTP server might handle, the rule needs more smarts than a simple string match.
A good rule that looks for root login on ftp would be:
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• The rule has a flow option, verifying this is traffic going to the server on an enstablished session.
• The rule has a content option, looking for root, which is the longest, most unique string in the attack. This option
is added to allow Snort’s setwise pattern match detection engine to give Snort a boost in speed.
• The rule has a pcre option, looking for user, followed at least one space character (which includes tab), followed
by root, ignoring case.
The content matching portion of the detection engine has recursion to handle a few evasion cases. Rules that are not
properly written can cause Snort to waste time duplicating checks.
The way the recursion works now is if a pattern matches, and if any of the detection options after that pattern fail, then
look for the pattern again after where it was found the previous time. Repeat until the pattern is not found again or the
opt functions all succeed.
On first read, that may not sound like a smart idea, but it is needed. For example, take the following rule:
This rule would look for “a”, immediately followed by “b”. Without recursion, the payload “aab” would fail, even
though it is obvious that the payload “aab” has “a” immediately followed by “b”, because the first ”a” is not immedi-
ately followed by “b”.
While recursion is important for detection, the recursion implementation is not very smart.
For example, the following rule options are not optimized:
content:"|13|"; dsize:1;
By looking at this rule snippit, it is obvious the rule looks for a packet with a single byte of 0x13. However, because
of recursion, a packet with 1024 bytes of 0x13 could cause 1023 too many pattern match attempts and 1023 too many
dsize checks. Why? The content 0x13 would be found in the first byte, then the dsize option would fail, and because
of recursion, the content 0x13 would be found again starting after where the previous 0x13 was found, once it is found,
then check the dsize again, repeating until 0x13 is not found in the payload again.
Reordering the rule options so that discrete checks (such as dsize) are moved to the begining of the rule speed up
Snort.
The optimized rule snipping would be:
dsize:1; content:"|13|";
A packet of 1024 bytes of 0x13 would fail immediately, as the dsize check is the first option checked and dsize is a
discrete check without recursion.
The following rule options are discrete and should generally be placed at the begining of any rule:
• dsize
• flags
• flow
• fragbits
• icmp id
• icmp seq
• icode
97
• id
• ipopts
• ip proto
• itype
• seq
• session
• tos
• ttl
• ack
• window
• resp
• sameip
The rule options byte test and byte jump were written to support writing rules for protocols that have length encoded
data. RPC was the protocol that spawned the requirement for these two rule options, as RPC uses simple length based
encoding for passing data.
In order to understand why byte test and byte jump are useful, let’s go through an exploit attempt against the sadmind
service.
This is the payload of the exploit:
89 09 9c e2 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 01 87 88 ................
00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 20 ...............
40 28 3a 10 00 00 00 0a 4d 45 54 41 53 50 4c 4f @(:.....metasplo
49 54 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 it..............
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 28 3a 14 00 07 45 df ........@(:...e.
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 04 ................
7f 00 00 01 00 01 87 88 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 04 ................
7f 00 00 01 00 01 87 88 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 11 ................
00 00 00 1e 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 3b 4d 45 54 41 53 50 4c 4f .......;metasplo
49 54 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 it..............
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 73 79 73 74 65 6d 00 00 ........system..
00 00 00 15 2e 2e 2f 2e 2e 2f 2e 2e 2f 2e 2e 2f ....../../../../
2e 2e 2f 62 69 6e 2f 73 68 00 00 00 00 00 04 1e ../bin/sh.......
<snip>
Let’s break this up, describe each of the fields, and figure out how to write a rule to catch this exploit.
There are a few things to note with RPC:
• Numbers are written as uint32s, taking four bytes. The number 26 would show up as 0x0000001a.
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• Strings are written as a uint32 specifying the length of the string, the string, and then null bytes to pad the length
of the string to end on a 4 byte boundary. The string “bob” would show up as 0x00000003626f6200.
The rest of the packet is the request that gets passed to procedure 1 of sadmind.
However, we know the vulnerability is that sadmind trusts the uid coming from the client. sadmind runs any request
where the client’s uid is 0 as root. As such, we have decoded enough of the request to write our rule.
First, we need to make sure that our packet is an RPC call.
Then, we need to make sure that our packet is a call to the procedure 1, the vulnerable procedure.
Then, we need to make sure that our packet has auth unix credentials.
We don’t care about the hostname, but we want to skip over it and check a number value after the hostname. This is
where byte test is useful. Starting at the length of the hostname, the data we have is:
00 00 00 0a 4d 45 54 41 53 50 4c 4f 49 54 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00
We want to read 4 bytes, turn it into a number, and jump that many bytes forward, making sure to account for the
padding that RPC requires on strings. If we do that, we are now at:
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00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00
which happens to be the exact location of the uid, the value we want to check.
In english, we want to read 4 bytes, 36 bytes from the beginning of the packet, and turn those 4 bytes into an integer
and jump that many bytes forward, aligning on the 4 byte boundary. To do that in a Snort rule, we use:
byte_jump:4,36,align;
Now that we have all the detection capabilities for our rule, let’s put them all together.
The 3rd and fourth string match are right next to each other, so we should combine those patterns. We end up with:
If the sadmind service was vulnerable to a buffer overflow when reading the client’s hostname, instead of reading the
length of the hostname and jumping that many bytes forward, we would check the length of the hostname to make
sure it is not too large.
To do that, we would read 4 bytes, starting 36 bytes into the packet, turn it into a number, and then make sure it is not
too large (let’s say bigger than 200 bytes). In Snort, we do:
byte_test:4,>,200,36;
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Chapter 4
101
Chapter 5
Dynamic Modules
Preprocessors, detection capabilities, and rules can now be developed as dynamically loadable module to snort. When
enabled via the –enable-dynamicplugin configure option, the dynamic API presents a means for loading dynamic
libraries and allowing the module to utilize certain functions within the main snort code.
The remainder of this chapter will highlight the data structures and API functions used in developing preprocessors,
detection engines, and rules as a dynamic plugin to snort.
5.1.1 DynamicPluginMeta
The DynamicPluginMeta structure defines the type of dynamic module (preprocessor, rules, or detection engine), the
version information, and path to the shared library. A shared library can implement all three types, but typically is
limited to a single functionality such as a preprocessor. It is defined in sf dynamic meta.h as:
5.1.2 DynamicPreprocessorData
The DynamicPreprocessorData structure defines the interface the preprocessor uses to interact with snort itself. This
inclues functions to register the preprocessor’s configuration parsing, restart, exit, and processing functions. It includes
function to log messages, errors, fatal errors, and debugging info. It also includes information for setting alerts,
handling Inline drops, access to the StreamAPI, and it provides access to the normalized http and alternate data
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buffers. This data structure should be initialized when the preprocessor shared library is loaded. It is defined in
sf dynamic preprocessor.h as:
PreprocRegisterFunc registerPreproc;
AddPreprocFunc addPreproc;
AddPreprocRestart addPreprocRestart;
AddPreprocExit addPreprocExit;
AddPreprocConfCheck addPreprocConfCheck;
RegisterPreprocRuleOpt preprocOptRegister;
AddPreprocProfileFunc addPreprocProfileFunc;
ProfilingFunc profilingPreprocsFunc;
void *totalPerfStats;
AlertQueueAdd alertAdd;
ThresholdCheckFunc thresholdCheck;
InlineFunc inlineMode;
InlineDropFunc inlineDrop;
DetectFunc detect;
DisableDetectFunc disableDetect;
DisableDetectFunc disableAllDetect;
SetPreprocBitFunc setPreprocBit;
StreamAPI *streamAPI;
SearchAPI *searchAPI;
char **config_file;
int *config_line;
printfappendfunc printfappend;
TokenSplitFunc tokenSplit;
TokenFreeFunc tokenFree;
GetRuleInfoByNameFunc getRuleInfoByName;
GetRuleInfoByIdFunc getRuleInfoById;
} DynamicPreprocessorData;
5.1.3 DynamicEngineData
The DynamicEngineData structure defines the interface a detection engine uses to interact with snort itself. This
includes functions for logging messages, errors, fatal errors, and debugging info as well as a means to register and
check flowbits. It also includes a location to store rule-stubs for dynamic rules that are loaded, and it provides access
to the normalized http and alternate data buffers. It is defined in sf dynamic engine.h as:
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typedef struct _DynamicEngineData
{
int version;
char *altBuffer;
UriInfo *uriBuffers[MAX_URIINFOS];
RegisterRule ruleRegister;
RegisterBit flowbitRegister;
CheckFlowbit flowbitCheck;
DetectAsn1 asn1Detect;
LogMsg logMsg;
LogMsg errMsg;
LogMsg fatalMsg;
char *dataDumpDirectory;
GetPreprocRuleOptFuncs getPreprocOptFuncs;
} DynamicEngineData;
5.1.4 SFSnortPacket
The SFSnortPacket structure mirrors the snort Packet structure and provides access to all of the data contained in a
given packet.
It and the data structures it incorporates are defined in sf snort packet.h as follows. Additional data structures may
be defined to reference other protocol fields.
#define MAX_IP_OPTIONS 40
/* ip option codes */
#define IPOPTION_EOL 0x00
#define IPOPTION_NOP 0x01
#define IPOPTION_RR 0x07
#define IPOPTION_RTRALT 0x14
#define IPOPTION_TS 0x44
#define IPOPTION_SECURITY 0x82
#define IPOPTION_LSRR 0x83
#define IPOPTION_LSRR_E 0x84
#define IPOPTION_SATID 0x88
#define IPOPTION_SSRR 0x89
104
{
u_int8_t option_code;
u_int8_t length;
u_int8_t *option_data;
} IPOptions;
105
u_int16_t seq;
} ICMPSequenceID;
union
{
/* type 12 */
u_int8_t parameter_problem_ptr;
/* type 5 */
struct in_addr gateway_addr;
/* type 8, 0 */
ICMPSequenceID echo;
/* type 13, 14 */
ICMPSequenceID timestamp;
/* type 15, 16 */
ICMPSequenceID info;
int voidInfo;
/* type 9 */
struct router_advertisement
{
u_int8_t number_addrs;
u_int8_t entry_size;
u_int16_t lifetime;
} router_advertisement;
} icmp_header_union;
#define icmp_parameter_ptr icmp_header_union.parameter_problem_ptr
#define icmp_gateway_addr icmp_header_union.gateway_waddr
#define icmp_echo_id icmp_header_union.echo.id
#define icmp_echo_seq icmp_header_union.echo.seq
#define icmp_timestamp_id icmp_header_union.timestamp.id
#define icmp_timestamp_seq icmp_header_union.timestamp.seq
#define icmp_info_id icmp_header_union.info.id
#define icmp_info_seq icmp_header_union.info.seq
#define icmp_void icmp_header_union.void
#define icmp_nextmtu icmp_header_union.path_mtu.nextmtu
#define icmp_ra_num_addrs icmp_header_union.router_advertisement.number_addrs
#define icmp_ra_entry_size icmp_header_union.router_advertisement.entry_size
#define icmp_ra_lifetime icmp_header_union.router_advertisement.lifetime
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union
{
/* timestamp */
struct timestamp
{
u_int32_t orig;
u_int32_t receive;
u_int32_t transmit;
} timestamp;
/* Router Advertisement */
struct router_address
{
u_int32_t addr;
u_int32_t preference;
} router_address;
/* type 17, 18 */
u_int32_t mask;
char data[1];
} icmp_data_union;
#define icmp_orig_timestamp icmp_data_union.timestamp.orig
#define icmp_recv_timestamp icmp_data_union.timestamp.receive
#define icmp_xmit_timestamp icmp_data_union.timestamp.transmit
#define icmp_ipheader icmp_data_union.ip_header
#define icmp_ra_addr0 icmp_data_union.router_address
#define icmp_mask icmp_data_union.mask
#define icmp_data icmp_data_union.data
} ICMPHeader;
107
#define CHECKSUM_INVALID_ICMP 0x08
#define CHECKSUM_INVALID_IGMP 0x10
void *fddi_header;
void *fddi_saps;
void *fddi_sna;
void *fddi_iparp;
void *fddi_other;
void *tokenring_header;
void *tokenring_header_llc;
void *tokenring_header_mr;
void *sll_header;
void *pflog_header;
void *old_pflog_header;
void *ether_header;
void *vlan_tag_header;
void *ether_header_llc;
void *ether_header_other;
void *wifi_header;
void *ether_arp_header;
void *ppp_over_ether_header;
u_int8_t *payload;
u_int16_t payload_size;
u_int16_t normalized_payload_size;
u_int16_t actual_ip_length;
108
u_int8_t ip_fragmented;
u_int16_t ip_fragment_offset;
u_int8_t ip_more_fragments;
u_int8_t ip_dont_fragment;
u_int8_t ip_reserved;
u_int16_t src_port;
u_int16_t dst_port;
u_int16_t orig_src_port;
u_int16_t orig_dst_port;
u_int32_t pcap_cap_len;
u_int8_t num_uris;
void *stream_session_ptr;
void *fragmentation_tracking_ptr;
void *flow_ptr;
void *stream_ptr;
IPOptions ip_options[MAX_IP_OPTIONS];
u_int32_t num_ip_options;
u_int8_t ip_last_option_invalid_flag;
TCPOptions tcp_options[MAX_TCP_OPTIONS];
u_int32_t num_tcp_options;
u_int8_t tcp_last_option_invalid_flag;
u_int8_t checksums_invalid;
u_int32_t flags;
#define FLAG_REBUILT_FRAG 0x00000001
#define FLAG_REBUILT_STREAM 0x00000002
#define FLAG_STREAM_UNEST_UNI 0x00000004
#define FLAG_STREAM_UNEST_BI 0x00000008
#define FLAG_STREAM_EST 0x00000010
#define FLAG_FROM_SERVER 0x00000040
#define FLAG_FROM_CLIENT 0x00000080
#define FLAG_HTTP_DECODE 0x00000100
#define FLAG_STREAM_INSERT 0x00000400
#define FLAG_ALT_DECODE 0x00000800
u_int32_t number_bytes_to_check;
void *preprocessor_bit_mask;
} SFSnortPacket;
A dynamic rule should use any of the following data structures. The following structures are defined in sf snort plugin api.h.
Rule
The Rule structure defines the basic outline of a rule and contains the same set of information that is seen in a text
rule. That includes protocol, address and port information and rule information (classification, generator and signature
IDs, revision, priority, classification, and a list of references). It also includes a list of rule options and an optional
evaluation function.
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#define RULE_MATCH 1
#define RULE_NOMATCH 0
ruleEvalFunc evalFunc;
RuleInformation
The RuleInformation structure defines the meta data for a rule and includes generator ID, signature ID, revision,
classification, priority, message text, and a list of references.
RuleReference
The RuleReference structure defines a single rule reference, including the system name and rereference identifier.
110
IPInfo
The IPInfo structure defines the initial matching criteria for a rule and includes the protocol, src address and port, des-
tination address and port, and direction. Some of the standard strings and variables are predefined - any, HOME NET,
HTTP SERVERS, HTTP PORTS, etc.
RuleOption
The RuleOption structure defines a single rule option as an option type and a reference to the data specific to that
option. Each option has a flags field that contains specific flags for that option as well as a ”Not” flag. The ”Not” flag
is used to negate the results of evaluating that option.
111
Asn1Context *asn1;
HdrOptCheck *hdrData;
LoopInfo *loop;
} option_u;
} RuleOption;
Some options also contain information that is initialized at run time, such as the compiled PCRE information, Boyer-
Moore content information, the integer ID for a flowbit, etc.
The option types and related structures are listed below.
/*
pcre.h provides flags:
PCRE_CASELESS
PCRE_MULTILINE
PCRE_DOTALL
PCRE_EXTENDED
PCRE_ANCHORED
112
PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY
PCRE_UNGREEDY
*/
#define ASN1_ABS_OFFSET 1
113
#define ASN1_REL_OFFSET 2
114
u_int32_t value; /* Value to compare value against */
u_int32_t mask_value; /* bits of value to ignore */
u_int32_t flags;
} HdrOptCheck;
#define CHECK_EQ 0
#define CHECK_NEQ 1
#define CHECK_LT 2
#define CHECK_GT 3
#define CHECK_LTE 4
#define CHECK_GTE 5
#define CHECK_AND 6
#define CHECK_XOR 7
#define CHECK_ALL 8
#define CHECK_ATLEASTONE 9
#define CHECK_NONE 10
115
The ByteExtract structure defines the information to use when extracting bytes for a DynamicElement used a in
Loop evaltion. It includes the number of bytes, an offset, multiplier, flags specifying the buffer, and a reference
to the DynamicElement.
The DynamicElement structure is used to define the values for a looping evaluation. It includes whether the
element is static (an integer) or dynamic (extracted from a buffer in the packet) and the value. For a dynamic
element, the value is filled by a related ByteExtract option that is part of the loop.
#define DYNAMIC_TYPE_INT_STATIC 1
#define DYNAMIC_TYPE_INT_REF 2
5.2.1 Preprocessors
Each dynamic preprocessor library must define the following functions. These are defined in the file sf dynamic preproc lib.c.
The metadata and setup function for the preprocessor should be defined sf preproc info.h.
• int LibVersion(DynamicPluginMeta *)
This function returns the metadata for the shared library.
• int InitializePreprocessor(DynamicPreprocessorData *)
This function initializes the data structure for use by the preprocessor into a library global variable, dpd and
invokes the setup function.
Each dynamic detection engine library must define the following functions.
116
• int LibVersion(DynamicPluginMeta *)
This function returns the metadata for the shared library.
• int InitializeEngineLib(DynamicEngineData *)
This function initializes the data structure for use by the engine.
The sample code provided with Snort predefines those functions and defines the following APIs to be used by a
dynamic rules library.
117
– int detectAsn1(void *p, Asn1Context *asn1, u int8 t *cursor)
This function evaluates an ASN.1 check for a given packet, as delimited by Asn1Context and cursor.
– int checkHdrOpt(void *p, HdrOptCheck *optData)
This function evaluates the given packet’s protocol headers, as specified by HdrOptCheck.
– int loopEval(void *p, LoopInfo *loop, u int8 t **cursor)
This function iterates through the SubRule of LoopInfo, as delimited by LoopInfo and cursor. Cursor
position is updated and returned in *cursor.
– int preprocOptionEval(void *p, PreprocessorOption *preprocOpt, u int8 t **cursor)
This function evaluates the preprocessor defined option, as spepcifed by PreprocessorOption. Cursor po-
sition is updated and returned in *cursor.
– void setTempCursor(u int8 t **temp cursor, u int8 t **cursor)
This function is used to handled repetitive contents to save off a cursor position temporarily to be reset at
later point.
– void revertTempCursor(u int8 t **temp cursor, u int8 t **cursor)
This function is used to revert to a previously saved temporary cursor position.
4
! NOTE
If you decide to write you own rule evaluation function, patterns that occur more than once may result in false
negatives. Take extra care to handle this situation and search for the matched pattern again if subsequent rule
options fail to match. This should be done for both content and PCRE options.
5.2.3 Rules
Each dynamic rules library must define the following functions. Examples are defined in the file sfnort dynamic detection lib.c.
The metadata and setup function for the preprocessor should be defined sfsnort dynamic detection lib.h.
• int LibVersion(DynamicPluginMeta *)
This function returns the metadata for the shared library.
• int EngineVersion(DynamicPluginMeta *)
This function defines the version requirements for the corresponding detection engine library.
• int DumpSkeletonRules()
This functions writes out the rule-stubs for rules that are loaded.
• int InitializeDetection()
This function registers each rule in the rules library. It should set up fast pattern-matcher content, register
flowbits, etc.
The sample code provided with Snort predefines those functions and uses the following data within the dynamic rules
library.
• Rule *rules[]
A NULL terminated list of Rule structures that this library defines.
5.3 Examples
This section provides a simple example of a dynamic preprocessor and a dynamic rule.
118
5.3.1 Preprocessor Example
The following is an example of a simple preprocessor. This preprocessor always alerts on a Packet if the TCP port
matches the one configured.
This assumes the the files sf dynamic preproc lib.c and sf dynamic preproc lib.h are used.
This is the metadata for this preprocessor, defined in sf preproc info.h.
#define MAJOR_VERSION 1
#define MINOR_VERSION 0
#define BUILD_VERSION 0
#define PREPROC_NAME "SF_Dynamic_Example_Preprocessor"
The remainder of the code is defined in spp example.c and is compiled together with sf dynamic preproc lib.c into
lib sfdynamic preprocessor example.so.
Define the Setup function to register the initialization function.
void ExampleSetup()
{
_dpd.registerPreproc("dynamic_example", ExampleInit);
u_int16_t portToCheck;
if(!strcasecmp("port", arg))
{
arg = strtok(NULL, "\t\n\r");
if (!arg)
{
_dpd.fatalMsg("ExamplePreproc: Missing port\n");
}
119
port = strtoul(arg, &argEnd, 10);
if (port < 0 || port > 65535)
{
_dpd.fatalMsg("ExamplePreproc: Invalid port %d\n", port);
}
portToCheck = port;
The function to process the packet and log an alert if the either port matches.
#define SRC_PORT_MATCH 1
#define SRC_PORT_MATCH_STR "example_preprocessor: src port match"
#define DST_PORT_MATCH 2
#define DST_PORT_MATCH_STR "example_preprocessor: dest port match"
void ExampleProcess(void *pkt, void *context)
{
SFSnortPacket *p = (SFSnortPacket *)pkt;
if (!p->ip4_header || p->ip4_header->proto != IPPROTO_TCP || !p->tcp_header)
{
/* Not for me, return */
return;
}
if (p->src_port == portToCheck)
{
/* Source port matched, log alert */
_dpd.alertAdd(GENERATOR_EXAMPLE, SRC_PORT_MATCH,
1, 0, 3, SRC_PORT_MATCH_STR, 0);
return;
}
if (p->dst_port == portToCheck)
{
/* Destination port matched, log alert */
_dpd.alertAdd(GENERATOR_EXAMPLE, DST_PORT_MATCH,
1, 0, 3, DST_PORT_MATCH_STR, 0);
return;
}
}
5.3.2 Rules
The following is an example of a simple rule, take from the current rule set, SID 109. It is implemented to work with
the detection engine provided with snort.
120
The snort rule in normal format:
This is the metadata for this rule library, defined in detection lib meta.h.
• Flow option
Define the FlowFlags structure and its corresponding RuleOption. Per the text version, flow is from server,established.
• Content Option
Define the ContentInfo structure and its corresponding RuleOption. Per the text version, content is ”NetBus”,
no depth or offset, case sensitive, and non-relative. Search on the normalized buffer by default. NOTE: This
content will be used for the fast pattern matcher since it is the longest content option for this rule and no contents
have a flag of CONTENT FAST PATTERN.
121
0, /* holder for length of byte representation */
0 /* holder for increment length */
};
The list of rule options. Rule options are evaluated in the order specified.
RuleOption *sid109options[] =
{
&sid109option1,
&sid109option2,
NULL
};
The rule itself, with the protocl header, meta data (sid, classification, message, etc).
Rule sid109 =
{
/* protocol header, akin to => tcp any any -> any any */
{
IPPROTO_TCP, /* proto */
HOME_NET, /* source IP */
"12345:12346", /* source port(s) */
0, /* Direction */
EXTERNAL_NET, /* destination IP */
ANY_PORT, /* destination port */
},
/* metadata */
{
3, /* genid -- use 3 to distinguish a C rule */
109, /* sigid */
5, /* revision */
"misc-activity", /* classification */
0, /* priority */
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"BACKDOOR netbus active", /* message */
sid109refs /* ptr to references */
},
sid109options, /* ptr to rule options */
NULL, /* Use internal eval func */
0, /* Holder, not yet initialized, used internally */
0, /* Holder, option count, used internally */
0, /* Holder, no alert, used internally for flowbits */
NULL /* Holder, rule data, used internally */
Rule *rules[] =
{
&sid109,
&sid637,
NULL
};
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Chapter 6
Snort Development
Currently, this chapter is here as a place holder. It will someday contain references on how to create new detection
plugins and preprocessors. End users don’t really need to be reading this section. This is intended to help developers
get a basic understanding of whats going on quickly.
If you are going to be helping out with Snort development, please use the HEAD branch of cvs. We’ve had problems
in the past of people submitting patches only to the stable branch (since they are likely writing this stuff for their own
IDS purposes). Bugfixes are what goes into STABLE. Features go into HEAD.
6.2.1 Preprocessors
For example, a TCP analysis preprocessor could simply return if the packet does not have a TCP header. It can do this
by checking:
if (p->tcph==null)
return;
Similarly, there are a lot of packet flags available that can be used to mark a packet as “reassembled” or logged. Check
out src/decode.h for the list of pkt * constants.
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6.2.2 Detection Plugins
Basically, look at an existing output plugin and copy it to a new item and change a few things. Later, we’ll document
what these few things are.
Generally, new output plugins should go into the barnyard project rather than the Snort project. We are currently
cleaning house on the available output options.
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Bibliography
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