SNORT AND OSSEC FEATURES

SNORT AND OSSEC FEATURES

SNORT:

Snort is an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system, IDS and IPS. This tool developed by Sourcefire team, combining the benefits of signature, protocol, and anomaly-based inspection. This is very powerful tool and more useful for Penetration Testers, and Security Reasercher.

Snort can perform protocol analysis and content searching/matching. It can be used to detect a variety of attacks and probes, such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, and much more. It uses a flexible rules language to describe traffic that it should collect or pass, as well as a detection engine that utilizes a modular plug-in architecture. Snort has a real-time alerting capability as well, incorporating alerting mechanisms for syslog, a user specified file, a UNIX socket, or WinPopup messages to Windows clients. Snort has three primary uses: a straight packet sniffer like tcpdump, a packet logger (useful for network traffic debugging, etc), or a full-blown network intrusion prevention system.

http://www.snort.org/

OSSEC:

OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System that performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.

Manager

The manager is the central piece of the OSSEC deployment. It stores the file integrity checking databases, the logs, events and system auditing entries. All the rules, decoders and major configuration options are stored centrally in the manager, making easy to administer even a large number of agents.

Agents

The agent is a small program installed on the systems you desire to monitor. It will collect information on real time and forward to the manager for analysis and correlation. It has a very small memory and CPU footprint by default, not affecting with the system’s usage.

Agent security: It runs with a low privilege user (created during the installation) and inside a chroot jail isolated from the system. Most of the agent configuration is pushed from the manager, with just some of them are stored locally on each agent. In case these local options are changed, the manager will receive the information and will generate an alert.

Agentless

For systems that you can’t install an agent, OSSEC allows you to perform file integrity monitoring on them without the agent installed. It can be very useful to monitor firewalls, routers and even Unix systems where you are not allowed to install the agent.

Virtualization/Vmware

OSSEC allows you to install the agent on the guest operating systems or inside the host (Vmware ESX). With the agent installed inside the VMware ESX you can get alerts about when a VM guest is being installed, removed, started, etc. It also monitors logins, logouts and errors inside the ESX server. In addition to that, OSSEC performs the CIS checks for Vmware, alerting if there is any insecure configuration option enabled or any other issue.

Firewalls, switches and routers

OSSEC can receive and analyze syslog events from a large variety of firewalls, switches and routers. It supports all Cisco routers, Cisco PIX, Cisco FWSM, Cisco ASA, Juniper Routers, Netscreen firewall, Checkpoint and many others.

http://www.ossec.net/