Snort Report 14 Posted

My 14th Snort Report titled Network session data analysis with Snort and Argus has been posted. The article doesn't talk about Snort (despite the title -- not mine!) but it does discuss Argus, the network session tool developed by Carter Bullard. From the start of the article:

This edition of the Snort Report departs from the standard format by introducing a data format and data collecting tool that can work alongside Snort. The data format is session data, and the tool is Argus 3.0.

Why session data?

The Snort intrusion detection system can identify suspicious and malicious activity by inspecting network traffic. Snort makes a judgment based on its analytical capabilities and notifies the operator of its decision by generating an alert. I call the output of this collect-inspect-report process "alert data."

While this is a good and necessary methodology, it has one important flaw. In most configurations, Snort is not told to report on what it sees if the traffic in question is deemed to be "normal." One might consider this aspect of Snort to be a benefit. Why generate an alert if the traffic is "normal" and not suspicious or malicious?

No alerting system can perfectly identify all suspicious or malicious activity. In many cases it's simply not possible -- especially on a packet-by-packet basis -- to identify a packet or stream as being worthy of an operator's attention. In those cases it makes sense to keep a log of the traffic. Recording traffic or characteristics of traffic for later analysis has recently been labeled retrospective network analysis (RNA), not to be confused with Sourcefire's Real-time Network Awareness. Others call recording traffic in this manner "network forensics," but that implies a degree of care and evidence handling that exceeds the methodology I present here.
When you collect data about traffic that Snort didn't consider to be suspicious or malicious, you have the opportunity to look back (hence the term "retrospective") to see what happened during an incident. How do you know to look back? Perhaps you receive a tip from law enforcement. Maybe a client reports odd activity. Or you perform a manual investigation and realize you'd like to know as much as possible about the network traffic of a certain host. In all of these situations, Snort might not have provided any clue that something was amiss.

Despite my attention to Snort in this series, I never deploy Snort as a stand-alone tool. I always supplement Snort with additional data sources. One of the most important supplementary data sources I collect is session data.

In my 15th Snort Report, already submitted to the publisher, I explain why IDS was never "dead." You might want to hear Marty Roesch's views on the subject in this video from RSA, where he also discusses Snort 3.0.