Suricata 1.4beta2 Available for testing!

Posted on | by inliniac

Photo by Eric LeblondThe OISF development team is proud to announce Suricata 1.4beta2. This is the second beta release for the upcoming 1.4 version.

The main addition of this release is a usable lua scripting keyword for detection: luajit. This keyword allows you to run Lua scripts as part of the detection engine, allowing inspection beyond what the rule language offers. While not cheap, performance is not bad at all due to use of the luajit engine.

This release also brings major performance enhancements. We’re able to get virtually packet loss free with AF_PACKET on our ISP test box with 6gbps-9gpbs of sustained traffic on commodity hardware with 7k rules.

Get the new release here: suricata-1.4beta2.tar.gz

New features

  • New keyword: “luajit” to inspect packet, payload and all HTTP buffers with a Lua script (#346)
  • Added ability to control per server HTTP parser settings in much more detail (#503)

Improvements

  • Rewrite of IP Defrag engine to improve performance and fix locking logic (#512, #540)
  • Big performance improvement in inspecting decoder, stream and app layer events (#555)
  • Pool performance improvements (#541)
  • Improved performance of signatures with simple pattern setups (#577)
  • Bundled docs are installed upon make install (#527)
  • Support for a number of global vs rule thresholds was added (#425)
  • Improved rule profiling performance
  • If not explicit fast_pattern is set, pick HTTP patterns over stream patterns. HTTP method, stat code and stat msg are excluded.

Fixes

  • Fix compilation on architectures other than x86 and x86_64 (#572)
  • Fix FP with anchored pcre combined with relative matching (#529)
  • Fix engine hanging instead of exitting if the pcap device doesn’t exist (#533)
  • Work around for potential FP, will get properly fixed in next release (#574)
  • Improve ERF handling. Thanks to Jason Ish
  • Always set cluster_id in PF_RING
  • IPFW: fix broken broadcast handling
  • AF_PACKET kernel offset issue, IPS fix and cleanup
  • Fix stream engine sometimes resending the same data to app layer
  • Fix multiple issues in HTTP multipart parsing
  • Fixed a lockup at shutdown with NFQ (#537)

Credits

We’d like to thank the following people and corporations for their contributions and feedback:

  • Jason Ish – Endace
  • Chris Wakelin
  • Rmkml

Known issues & missing features

In a beta release like this things may not be as polished yet. So please handle with care. That said, if you encounter issues, please let us know! As always, we are doing our best to make you aware of continuing development and items within the engine that are not yet complete or optimal.  With this in mind, please notice the list we have included of known items we are working on.

See issues for an up to date list and to report new issues. See Known_issues for a discussion and time line for the major issues.

About Suricata

Suricata is a high performance Network IDS, IPS and Network Security Monitoring engine. Open Source and owned by a community run non-profit foundation, the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF). Suricata is developed by the OISF, its supporting vendors and the community.