So after 20 years, IBM is killing off my BlackICE code created in April 1998. So it’s time that I rewrite it.
BlackICE was the first “inline” intrusion-detection system, aka. an “intrusion prevention system” or IPS. ISS purchased my company in 2001 and replaced their RealSecure engine with it, and later renamed it Proventia. Then IBM purchased ISS in 2006. Now, they are formally canceling the project and moving customers onto Cisco’s products, which are based on Snort.
So now is a good time to write a replacement. The reason is that BlackICE worked fundamentally differently than Snort, using protocol analysis rather than pattern-matching. In this way, it worked more like Bro than Snort. The biggest benefit of protocol-analysis is speed, making it many times faster than Snort. The second benefit is better detection ability, as I describe in this post on Heartbleed.
So my plan is to create a new project. I’ll be checking in the starter bits into GitHub starting a couple weeks from now. I need to figure out a new name for the project, so I don’t have to rip off a name from William Gibson like I did last time :).
Some notes:
- Yes, it’ll be GNU open source. I’m a capitalist, so I’ll earn money like snort/nmap dual-licensing it, charging companies who don’t want to open-source their addons. All capitalists GNU license their code.
- C, not Rust. Sorry, I’m going for extreme scalability. We’ll re-visit this decision later when looking at building protocol parsers.
- It’ll be 95% compatible with Snort signatures. Their language definition leaves so much ambiguous it’ll be hard to be 100% compatible.
- It’ll support Snort output as well, though really, Snort’s events suck.
- Protocol parsers in Lua, so you can use it as a replacement for Bro, writing parsers to extract data you are interested in.
- Protocol state machine parsers in C, like you see in my Masscan project for X.509.
- First version IDS only. These days, “inline” means also being able to MitM the SSL stack, so I’m gong to have to think harder on that.
- Mutli-core worker threads off PF_RING/DPDK/netmap receive queues. Should handle 10gbps, tracking 10 million concurrent connections, with quad-core CPU.
- Requirements from people who work daily with IDS/IPS today. I need you to write up what your products do well that you really like. I need to you write up what they suck at that needs to be fixed. These need to be in some detail.
- Testing environment to play with. This means having a small server plugged into a real-world link running at a minimum of several gigabits-per-second available for the next year. I’ll sign NDAs related to the data I might see on the network.
- Coders. I’ll be doing the basic architecture, but protocol parsers, output plugins, etc. will need work. Code will be in C and Lua for the near term. Unfortunately, since I’m going to dual-license, I’ll need waivers before accepting pull requests.
Article Link: http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/08/announcement-ips-code.html