Snort Rule Infographic
Official Documentation
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SNORTOLOGY 101
THE ANATOMY OF A SNORT RULE
WHAT IS SNORT?
Snort is an open source network intrusion prevention system (IPS) by Cisco. It is capable of performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP networks. It can perform protocol analysis, content searching and matching, and detect a variety of attacks and probes. Snort can be used as a straight packet sniffer like tcpdump, a packet logger (useful for network traffic debugging), or as a full-blown network intrusion prevention system.
LET’S BREAK IT DOWN
BASIC OUTLINE OF A SNORT RULE
[action][protocol][sourceIP][sourceport] -> [destIP][destport] ( [Rule options] )
|___________________ Rule Header _________________|
RULE HEADER
The rule header contains the rule's action, protocol,
source and destination IP addresses and netmasks,
and the source and destination ports information.
alert Action to take (option) 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
(usually alert).
tcp Type of traffic (protocol) 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.
$EXTERNAL_NET Source address(es) variable or literal
$HTTP_PORTS Source port(s) variable or literal
-> Direction operator The direction operator ->
indicates the orientation of the traffic to which
the rule applies.
$HOME_NET Destination address(es) variable or literal
any Destination port(s) variable or literal
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 a semicolon (;). Rule option keywords are separated from their arguments with a colon (:).
GENERAL RULE OPTIONS
Message A meaningful message typically includes what the rule is detecting.
The msg rule option tells Snort what to output when the rule matches.
It is a simple text string.
Flow For the rule to fire, specifies which direction the network traffic is going.
The flow keyword is used in conjunction with TCP stream reassembly.
It allows rules to only apply to certain directions of the traffic flow.
Reference The reference keyword allows rules to include references
to external sources of information.
Classtype The classtype keyword is how Snort shares what the effect
of a successful attack would be.
sid/rev The snort id is a unique identifier for each rule. This information
allows output plugins to identify rules easily and should be used with
the rev (revision) keyword.
DETECTION OPTIONS
Content This important feature allows the user to set rules that search for
specific content in the packet payload and trigger response based on that
data. The option data can contain mixed text and binary data.
distance/offset These keywords allow the rule writer to specify where
to start searching relative to the beginning of the payload or the
beginning of a content match.
within/depth These keywords allow the rule write to specify how far
forward to search relative to the end of a previous content match and,
once that content match is found, how far to search for it.
PCRE The pcre keyword allows rules to be written using perl compatible
regular expressions which allows for more complex matches than simple
content matches.
Byte test The byte_test options allows a rule to test a number of bytes
against a specific value in binary.
EXAMPLE
Rule Header alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET $HTTP_PORTS -> $HOME_NET any
Message msg: “BROWSER-IE Microsoft Internet Explorer CacheSize exploit attempt”;
Flow flow: to_client,established;
Detection file_data;
content:"recordset"; offset:14; depth:9;
content:".CacheSize"; distance:0; within:100;
pcre:"/CacheSize\s*=\s*/";
byte_test:10,>,0x3ffffffe,0,relative,string;
Metadata policy max-detect-ips drop, service http;
References reference:cve,2016-8077;
Classification classtype: attempted-user;
Signature ID sid:65535;rev:1;
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