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04-06-03 Wow, over a year since the last update. Well, this is "2.0" but not
quite the 2.0 we were expecting. It's vastly more capable than the
1.8.x and 1.9.x releases, more stable, audited, well tested in a
commericial test environment (thanks to Sourcefire) and generally
just "better" than what has come before, but it's not the
revolutionary leap that I had envisioned. Will that leap happen
someday? Probably, but the timeline will shift and things will
look different than we have been talking about for the last 18
months.
Snort is pretty high profile now, we've got new open source IDSes
nipping at our heels (amazing how they all claim to be "better" than
Snort, yet usually only encompass a small subset of it's features).
I continue to be amazed by the robustness of the architecture that
was developed over three years ago and the latest and greatest
improvements that have been added, the new detection engine from
Norton & Roelker has racked up impressive performance numbers,
Chris Green's sheparding of the stream4 and frag2 preprocessors as
I've been out doing "business things" has been great as well.
Speaking of business, if you like Snort but are interested in a
commercially supported version with enterprise scalability, take
a look at Sourcefire (http://www.sourcefire.com). There are other
companies that put "Snort on a box" out there (google for them),
but Sourcefire is taking Snort in new directions (and I started it).
Snort is still free (and always will be), but if you find yourself
saying "I need to deploy and manage [5|10|20|100] Snort sensors,
is there anyone who can help me?", give us a shout.
As for features, we've got quite a few new ones for 2.0:
* Higher performance (due to a new pattern matcher and rebuilt
detection engine)
* Better decoders
* Enhanced stream reassembly and defragmentation
* Tons of bug fixes
* Updated rules
* Updated snort.conf
* New detection keywords (byte_test, byte_jump, distance,
within) & stateful pattern matching
* New HTTP flow analyzer
* Enhanced anomaly detection (HTTP, RPC, TCP, IP, etc)
* Better self preservation in stateful subsystems
* Xrefs fixed
* Flexresp works faster and more effectively
* Better chroot()'ing
* Fixed 802.1q decoding
* Better async state handling
* New alerting option: -A cmg!!
* Major tagging updates
03-14-02 Ok We're going to start being better about doing this more regularly.
This release has many many fixes over 1.8.3. Lots of bugs
in stream4 have been ironed out thanks to Phil Wood. The
ICMP decoders have been rewritten.
The major "gotcha" with this release will be that rules
with <- used as the direction operator are no longer
accepted. This is a bug fix in that it was assumed to be
-> before ( unless you compiled with a specific define set
).
* (This is a summary of recent changes -- not all mine)
* Fixed stream4 offset initialization
* Double Open of snort log file
* Lots of new rules
* Fatal error on problems other than -> and <>
* Fixed stream4 several low memory conditions
* Error checking in stream4/frag2 argument parsing
* snortdb schema updates to 1.05
* --with-pcap-includes should now look at specified pcap
* packet statistics now should be more accurate with regards to lost
packets werwerwerwerwer
* double PID file write
* S4 alignment problems on Sparc fixed
* new snmptrap code
* documentation updates
* Stability fixes in frag2
11-29-01 And the hits keep on coming. There were some other things broken
in 1.8.2 that needed to get fixed (flexresp was totally
inoperative, crashbug in frag2, etc). Anyway, this one has had
some pretty decent testing done on the core functionality and
everything seems to be running nicely now.
Major repairs include a fix to frag2 on Linux platforms, the icmp
decoder and printout routines were updated to match the data
structures that I implemented in 1.8.1 and the flexresp code was
repaired and should now be faster, plus the usual rule updates. I
also added a new "-B" command line switch to convert IP addresses
in a pcap file to a new specified IP subnet addresses.
On to 2.0...
11-02-01 Ok, I lied. There was enough little stuff to fix in 1.8.1 that I
decided to do a 1.8.2 release. This is just about fully a bugfix
release, but Snort is now more stable and more usable than it's been
in quite a while, and should do a good job of tiding people over
while we transition to 2.0 and the codebase gets a little more
"fluid".
Here's the list of fixes:
* fixed UTC timestamps
* fixed SIGUSR1 handling, should reset properly now after getting
a signal
* fixed PID path generation code, PID files go in the right place
now
* fixed stability problems in stream4
* fixed stability problems in frag2
* tweaks to spo_unified for better integration with barnyard
* added -f switch to turn off fflush() calls in binary logging mode
* added new config keyword to stream4, "log_flushed_streams", which
causes all buffered packets in the stream reassembler for that
session to be logged in the event of an event on that stream
(must be used in conjunction with spo_log_tcpdump)
* added packet precacheing for flexresp TCP packets, responses
should be generated more quickly
* fixed rules parser code for various failure modes
* several new rules files and a new classification system
After this release we're going to reorganize the whole source tree
and do a quick 1.9 release with the new code layout. Once that's
done, we're going to begin coding 2.0 in earnest in December,
hopefully doing our initial release sometime in the February time
frame.
08-14-01 I was planning on getting this release out sooner than this (since
it's largely a bugfix release) but my wife and I went and had a
baby 2 weeks ago, which effected the schedule a little. ;) Anyway,
barring any major problems the Snort 1.x code will now be going
into maintenance mode as we begin development on 2.0.
This version adds the following:
* SNMP alerts
* IDMEF XML output (the Silicon Defense plugin is integrated into
the main codebase now)
* Limited regex support in the rules language
* New packet counters for stream4 and frag2
* New normalization mode for http_decode
And a slew of bug fixes. We should get to work on 2.0 shortly, so
hopefully the next release of this NEWS file will be talking about
that! (knock on wood...)
07-09-01 Well, this one was a long time coming, but I think it was worth the
wait. Snort can now perform stateful inspection, has improved
defragmentation capabilities, uses less memory, leaks less of the
memory that it does use, is faster, and has a bunch of other good
stuff. Truely, this is probably the ultimate development of the
1.X series of Snort. After this version we will begin development
on Snort 2.0, which will have a great many new features, be faster
and more flexible, and generally be about the finest network
intrusion detection system that an open source community can build.
See the Changelog (read all the way back to January of this year)
for changes and additions, there are far to many to list here.
Some of the highlights include
* stateful inspection
* new tcp stream reassembly code
* new ip defragmenter
* new protocol available for the rules language: ip
* more extensive printouts of cross reference and info in alerts
* new normalizer preprocessors for telnet, rpc
* 2 new output plugins (unified, csv)
* 5 new preprocessors (stream4, frag2, bo, telnet_decode,
rpc_decode)
* 10 new rule options
* unique rule IDs
* A whole slew of command line options (7 at last count)
* Mega bug-fixes from 1.7
Snort can now leap tall buildings in a single bound.
The future holds 2.0, which will revisit most of the code in Snort.
It probably won't be released for another 6 months or so, but for
the time being I'm happy with what we've produced here and I think
most people will be happy with it too.
Please read the USAGE, FAQ, README, man page and any other docs you
can before asking your questions, there's a good chance that the
answer you're looking for is in there.
Commercial plug: If you decide that you need or want to take your
Snort installation to the next level, Sourcefire Inc.
(http://www.sourcefire.com) is now producing commercial network
intrusion detection appliances based on Snort with data analysis,
management, and rules GUIs built-in. See the web site for more
information, if you want to have a commercially supported,
professional Snort deployment, Sourcefire is the company to call.
01-02-01 Welcome to version 1.7. This version features clean compiles
on following architectures and platforms:
* Linux 2.0.X, Linux 2.1.X, Linux 2.2.X (i386)
* FreeBSD 3.x, 4.x (i386)
* SunOS/gcc 5.5, 5.5.1, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 (sparc)
* OpenBSD 2.7, 2.8
* Tru64/gcc
* HPUX 11.0/gcc
Other platforms/architectures should be supported as well, we just
don't have them available for testing on the moment.
There are a ton of bug fixes and new features in this version, have
a look at the ChangeLog to see many of them. I think that this
will be the last full point release of the 1.X codebase, we're
starting design work on the 2.0 series and I hope that we'll be
putting it out there in the not too distant future (less than six
months!).
It's been a long road to 1.7, the amount of code in the program
compared to the initial release over two years ago is incredible.
We're just getting rolling though, and 2.0 is going to bring a
great number of changes including more plugin interfaces (packet
acquisition and decode), faster/cleaner code (I hope ;) and a
better design for performing more types of analysis.
Big changes in this version: snort-lib renamed to snort.conf, IP
defragmentation plugin now 100% on all architectures, tcp stream
reassembly, statistical anomaly detection, three new command line
switches (-L,-I,-X), IP address lists, a cool "automatic variable"
in the rules file that automatically picks up the IP address and
netmask of a named interface, more packet header printouts,
detection plugins for TOS and the IP fragment bits, as well as a
plugin that allows reference data to be attached to rules and a
completely rewritten active response module, etc.
I hope everyone likes this release, we've put a ton of work into it
to make sure that it's functional and stable while still being
easy to use for everyone.
07-22-00 Welcome to version 1.6.3. This version features clean compiles
on all architectures and OS's that I have access to, some
elusive bug fixes in the decoders, a little bit better
packet printing, full-time ARP packet decoding (instead of only
when the -a option is spec'd), and an upgraded portscan
detector. The moral of the story with the 1.6.1->1.6.2.2
release cycle was "don't release when you're working on the
road". This will be the last version release until the
Hiverworld IDS ships as I need to dedicate myself fully to
that cause. Please watch http://www.snort.org for information
on the availability for an upgraded defragmentation
preprocessor, the one shipping with this version should be
treated as *beta* code!
07-08-00 It wouldn't be a relase without a disaster, and in that vein
we lost the ability to compile cleanly on Linux boxes with
version 1.6.1. Typical. Lessons learned: I need to reinstall
a RedHat box at Snort Labs so that I can do compile tests
before release. C'est la vie.
07-06-00 Version 1.6.1 is finally ready to see the light of day. This
release is mostly a bug fix with a few minor feature additions
for runtime security. Version 1.7 is a few months behind in
development due to my busy schedule at Hiverworld where I'm
putting together a completely new (not Snort-based) IDS.
Version 1.7 is in development and you can check the latest
beta functionality by checking it out from the CVS repository.
The features that have or are going to be added include dynamic
rules (rules that turn on other rules), variable alert levels,
port and IP sets for rules, and a few other goodies, plus
a slew of new plugins.
Additionally, the snort.org web site has gone live since the
last release, and it's pretty much a one-stop-shop for all
things Snort related (that and www.whitehats.com).
I hope to have version 1.7 available by the October SANS
Network Security 2000 conference.
03-20-00 Bang! Here's version 1.6, marvel at its glory! :) I'm going
to keep this short since it's 3AM, but I think that everyone
is going to like the changes and additions since version 1.5.
Be sure to check out the new rules writing document at
http://www.clark.net/~roesch/snort_rules.html!
02-26-00 1.6 is still in the works, but this one fixes a few problems
with people trying to compile on SunOS/Solaris/HP-UX boxes.
This release really falls more into the "tweak" category, but I
think it's important enough to put out. Version 1.6 is coming
RSN, but will probably be a couple more weeks!
01-03-00 This one is a minor bug fix in preparation for the impending
release of version 1.6. Version 1.6 is in beta, but I couldn't
hold back doing a release of this bug fix version any longer.
Speaking of 1.6, it should be out in about two weeks, and will
incorporate a bunch of cool new functionality. Stay tuned!
12-8-99 Wow, almost two months since the last major release. Well, if
you thought the last one was big, this one is HUGE! There are
nine major additions to this release, including plugins,
session recording, improved flexibility in the rules files,
better packet content analysis, and a bunch of other stuff.
Snort is faster, more efficient, more flexible, and more
powerful than 1.3.1. Not bad for two month's work, eh? :)
What's down the road from here? Well, the Token Ring decoder
needs to get finished, and then there are three big topics that
Snort needs to address: IP defragmentation, TCP stream
reassembly, and port scan detection. Fortunately, the new
plugin architecture implemented in this version of Snort
makes the addition of these huge features relatively painless
from a development standpoint. The modules can simpley be
developed and then dropped right into every copy of Snort
out there.
The really cool functional (user level) things about version
1.5 are session logging with the new "session" keyword,
multiple content tests per rule, rules file variables, and the
IP options inspection keyword "ipopts". Check out the
RULES.SAMPLE file (at the bottom) for more info on the new
stuff.
10-13-99 Welp, here's the bug fix release. There was one really big
stupid bug in this one plus some other minor annoying stuff,
so here's a patch to clean things up a bit. I also added some
functionality to the dsize option keyword, you can specify
">" or "<" now to select ranges.
2.0 is progressing slowly in the face of various conference
activity I have over the next few months. I'm looking at a late
November or mid-December release now, but hang in there, it's
coming.
09-18-99 This is probably the last 1.x release of Snort (barring a
possible bugfix release). The next planned version is 2.0
and it will be radically changed for the better. It will
include a faster, more flexible detection engine, plug-in
support for detection, output, and monitoring modules, and
a plethora of other options. Look for it in late October or
early November!
This version includes an enhanced logging/alerting engine that
is several times faster than the Snort 1.2.1. The logging
and alerting command line options are also more streamlined
so that people may have the flexibility to choose how they log.
Enjoy!
08-06-99 This is the official "mea culpa" version of Snort.
Version 1.2 wasn't exactly a high quality release for
non-Linux platforms, and so here we are five days later with
version 1.2.1. Thanks to everyone's bug reports and a small
band of volunteers, this release is much more stable than
version 1.2 and should configure and build cleanly on
all platforms and architectures, including Sparcs and OpenBSD.
While all of the bug fixing was taking place, I actually found
time to integrate some patches that people generously sent in
during the week. That kind of makes this release value added,
it's not just a bug fix there's actually some new stuff in
here!
If this version proves to be stable and everyone is pretty much
happy with the way things are working, this will be the last
release for a month or so. I'm writing a paper for the LISA
'99 conference about Snort, and I need to concentrate on
finishing it and getting some facts and figures about the
software together. After that is done, I've got some
enhancements for the detection engine thought up that are
truly radical, stay tuned..... :)
08-03-99 Oops!
08-01-99 Well, here it finally is, the big performance release. This
version has a slick new packet decoder and a brand spankin'
new, fully recursive, detection engine. It kicks ass! :)
Large sections of the code have been restructured to eliminate
global data structures and streamline how much real data has
to be passed around. Two major global data structures have
been eliminated to make the code more thread friendly in case
I ever get motivated enough to multi-thread this beast. The
SMB alerting code is now an option, use the
"--enable-smbalerts" switch to the configure script if you're
interested in using it. Preliminary performance testing has
shown this version to be about twice as fast as version 1.1
in most cases, sometimes up to 500% faster than 1.1! There's
a lot of new code in this release, so if anyone finds any
bugs I'd appreciate hearing about it. Thanks!
06-21-99 Tons of new and improved stuff this release. Three new command
line options, six new rule options, eight big bugs squashed, and
a shiny new content parser. The WinPopup stuff was donated by
Damien Daspit. It breaks one of my cardinal rules of security
software coding (thou shalt not exec a program from within
another), but it was so I cool I put it in pretty much
unmodified. Probably in the next version I'll rig something up
so that it will be a compile time define where you have to
specify a switch when you ./configure, but for now it's in. It
shouldn't be too much of a problem since you have to be root to
run Snort anyway. Trinux users can rejoice a bit, I hardcoded
the netmasks into the program, so it no longer needs to be
linked against libm, which was quite large to be putting on
floppy disks. The new tcpdump file read option is cool, and as
soon as I get my tcpdump file defragmenter working, Snort will
have the ability to decode and alert based on fragments. C'est
cool, no?
05-18-99 This release is primarily to fix some bugs that made it out in
version 1.0. At the time of release, my Sparc was broken and I
didn't have a good way of testing the big endian/non-x86 stuff,
so some little bugs made it out the door. This version has
been tested on a real live SPARCstation 10 (Sol 2.5.1) and
seems to work as advertised, so I'm putting it out the door.
This release also features support for HP-UX and S/Linux thanks
to Chris Sylvain's nice work. (Thanks Chris!) There are some
other small additions, like the packet counter statistics on
exit and the "-x" command line switch which allows you to
specifically turn on IPX packet notification (since I still
haven't written a IPX decoder). The next release is going to
have a new and improved content parser, I've discoverd that the
current one, uh, sucks. See the Changelog for specifics on
what's fixed in this version.
04-28-99 Woohoo! One point oh baby! New stuff: now does SLIP and
RAW (PPP) packets, so all you people out there with modems can
use Snort now too. I also added in options to send alerts to
syslog. The stability/functionality of the last release was
good enough for me to decide that 1.0 was ready to ship, so
here it is. Enjoy!
04-17-99 Well, I guess I decided to change things around a bit. I have
rewritten about half of the rules parser so that future
addition of rule types people find generally interesting will be
much easier to do. I also totally rewrote the logging section
so that it was more sane to write follow on code with. Those
are the major big changes. I'm finally happy with the way this
software is laid out and operates, so if this one works pretty
well, I'll slap whatever bug fixes need to be made onto it and
it'll really truly be version 1.0.
04-06-99 Ok, this is the big one, I think everything is stable enough
now for a general release. If this one doesn't do anything
bizzare once it gets out into the real world, it's going to be
version 1.0, and this time I mean it! :) Note that I'm
including the snort-lib template file, which has some useful
patterns and rules that people may want to use. Also note that
this is version 0.99 rc5, there was no version rc4! Ok, that's
it for now, if anyone has any problems with this version, let
me know!
03-24-99 Let me just say that I think I might need to implement some
sort of formalized testing regimen before making major
releases. Please pardon the last two crap releases, not enough
time and too much work for one person to do. (lets all have a
pity party...) Anyway, I beat the crap out of this version
with iptest and nmap, and I think it works pretty damn good
now. Lets hope it continues to work well tomorrow...
03-21-99 Ok, good size update, I think this may turn out to be 1.0, but
I'm done thinking that seriously for the time being. Added
TCP flag-based rules, port range rules, IP and TCP option
decoding, truncated packet handling, improved fragmented packet
handling, and some bug fixing. I'm not quite sure what else I'd
like to put in before the 1.0 release, so I thinking this is
going to be it. If there's any big feature you've been wishing
for, now's the time to ask!
03-08-99 Got a request to do more precise timestamping, so I ripped off
the TCPDump timestamp routine and stuffed it in Snort. You
can now see which particular millisecond packet XYZ showed up
in. I'm working on the rest of the stuff....
03-06-99 Well, no new rules yet, but this program is a lot faster than
the last release. The two biggest bottleneck routines have been
rewritten and are now faster and more efficient. I've also
started doing more complete decoding of the IP header, starting
with the fragment data. For those of you not using Linux,
collected/dropped packet statistics are now being generated
when Snort is exited.
The next release will (hopefully) decode the fragments and be
able to apply the rules set to them. I'm also planning on
having IP Option decoding in the next release, plus the new
rules set. Stay tuned!
02-18-99 I've started a new job and gotten one of those ergonomic
keyboards, so development has slowed a bit. This release
focuses on minor bug fixes and code cleanup. I'm thinking about
changing the rules format to something with one rule argument
per line. This will make for larger, more readable rules files
at the cost of more typing for the user. It sorta sucks,
but this is the best way I can think of to do it...
01-28-99 Content based logging is done. With this addition, this thing
can finally be used for light duty IDS tasks and catch most
things. There still needs to be some additional work done to
add rules for things like TCP flags, fragments, and IP options,
but the base structure is there.
Automatic rules sorting is implemented now too, so you can make
your rules look as disorganized as you want.
If nobody finds any show stopper bugs in this release, this is
going to be 1.0!
01-19-99 Rules based packet capture is a reality now. Added it pretty
much all in a day or so of serious hacking. The code is
modularized now into excitingly chunky files. I did this to
avoid insanity, and I highly recommend it. Look at the README
file or the "RULES.SAMPLE" file to see how rules work. I also
fixed the seriously porked logging code, now all conversations
end up in single files based upon the homenet address command
line parameter, or in its absense, hi port/lo port. I highly
recommend using the homenet capability (-h option).
Coming soon: Content based logging!
01-08-99 I'm thinking about putting in some "capture/pass" logic into
the program to facilitate rules/content based traffic capture.
In other words, make some kind of light intrusion detection
capability. Look for it by version 1.0.
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