Snort Inline Part II

By Pete Savage

Introduction

Last month, we danced around with joy at achieving our goal of compiling and installing snort_inline, the IPS modification to the common snort package. This month, however, we turn our attention to some of the maintenance tasks that will keep our Intrusion Prevention System running and up to date.

This second installment will focus on the following tasks;

• Automatically updating snorts rules.
• Designing a script to enable snort to be restarted easily, and started at boot time.

In last month's article, we converted all of our snort rules from accept to drop. It is useful to peruse the logs from time to time, as there are always false positives being offered in the snort community. If you do discover that a rule is causing normal traffic to be dropped, you can always change the rules action type from drop back to alert.

Whilst your snort_inline box at the end of last month may have been reasonably up to date, a lot has happened since then. Virus writers have been busy and shell coders have been feverishly coding. The world being the place it is, it is is important that you keep the rules on your snort_inline box up to date. This process can be performed manually, or with the help of a small package called OinkMaster.

The snort.org website offers three different types of rule update downloads: subscription, i.e., payed for, registered, and unregistered. Since the unregistered rules are updated only at the time of the latest major release from snort.org, and subscription rules require payment, we have opted to use the registration rules for this article.

You will need to create an account with snort.org, before you can continue. At the bottom of your user preferences page, click the add code button to generate your unique snort code. We are going to use a fictional code for purposes of this article, 587cba039g9f03300f9e98b.

You unique snort code is used to allow you to download the latest snort rules as a registered user. We will need to modify the configuration file for OinkMaster, for it to download these latest rules for us. Please follow the steps below to obtain OinkMaster, and begin configuration. For reference, we used the file oinkmaster-1.2.tar.gz. As in the previous article, we will be assuming that all files will be downloaded to /home/snort/

mv /home/snort/oinkmaster-1.2.tar.gz /usr/src/
cd /usr/src
tar xzvf oinkmaster-1.2.tar.gz
cd oinkmaster-1.2
cp oinkmaster.pl /usr/local/bin/
cp oinkmaster.conf /etc/

Above, we have moved the oinkmaster script to the /usr/local/bin directory. This can be moved to any location you desire, but, for the rest of this article, we will assume that it is residing in /usr/local/bin/. The same applies to the oinkmaster.conf file, except this has been moved to /etc/. We are now ready to begin editing the OinkMaster configuration file, to take advantage of our snort registration. Open the file /etc/oinkmaster.conf in your favorite editor. At around line 61, your should modify the line...

# url = https://www.snort.org/pub-bin/oinkmaster.cgi/<oinkcode>/snortrules-snapshot-2.3.tar.gz

...and replace <oinkcode> with your newly acquired key from above. We will be using our dummy key from above, as an example.

url = https://www.snort.org/pub-bin/oinkmaster.cgi/587cba039g9f03300f9e98b/
	snortrules-snapshot-2.3.tar.gz

This should now make OinkMaster able to download all available snort updates. We will perform one more modification, in order to make OinkMaster change all alert rules to drop rules. The implications of this have already been discussed previously. There may in fact be some rules that you do not want to be of the type "drop".

At around line 292 in the oinkmaster.conf file, you should see the comment below:

# Example to make SID 1378 a 'drop' rule (valid if you're running
# Snort_inline).
# modifysid 1378 "^alert" | "drop"

This makes a direct reference to our implementation of snort, and gives us an example of how to modify a rule from alert to drop. It is worth noting, at this stage, that all official snort rules come with an SID. This is a unique value used to identify the rule against others, and allow release notes for each rule. In this way, we can perform a modification to a specific rule. We will now add a line below this, to convert all of our alert rules to drop rules.

modifysid * "^alert" | "drop"

The star in the line above tells OinkMaster to apply the modification to all rules it downloads.

If we now create a temporary directory, we can test our OinkMaster configuration, and see if our rules have been downloaded and modified.

cd /usr/src/oinkmaster-1.2
mkdir temp_rules
/usr/local/bin/oinkmaster.pl -o /usr/src/oinkmaster-1.2/temp_rules/

After issuing the commands above, you should see some output, similar to that below. This output has been abbreviated to save space.

Loading /etc/oinkmaster.conf
Downloading file from https://www.snort.org/pub-bin/oinkmaster.cgi/
	5266c89575f91010b2315c594281c4b1baebd965/snortrules-snapshot-2.3.tar.gz... done.
Archive successfully downloaded, unpacking... done.
Setting up rules structures... done.
Processing downloaded rules... disabled 0, enabled 0, modified 3190, total=3304
Setting up rules structures... done.
Comparing new files to the old ones... done.
Updating rules... done.

[***] Results from Oinkmaster started 20050811 11:06:44 [***]

[*] Rules modifications: [*]
    None.

[*] Non-rule line modifications: [*]
    None.

[+] Added files (consider updating your snort.conf to include them if needed): [+]

    -> attack-responses.rules
    -> backdoor.rules
    -> bad-traffic.rules
    -> chat.rules
...

From the output above, we can tell that OinkMaster modified all 3190 rules, and added all rules that weren't already present: In our case, this was all of them. Now, issue the command below;

head /usr/src/oinkmaster-1.2/temp_rules/web-attacks.rules -n 20

After some comments about licensing, you should see two rules, as below. Notice that the first word of each line is drop, indicating that our SID modification has worked.

drop tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> $HTTP_SERVERS $HTTP_PORTS 
	(msg:"WEB-ATTACKS /bin/ps command attempt"; flow:to_server,established;
	uricontent:"/bin/ps"; nocase; classtype:web-application-attack; sid:1328; rev:6;)
drop tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> $HTTP_SERVERS $HTTP_PORTS
	(msg:"WEB-ATTACKS ps command attempt"; flow:to_server,established; 
	uricontent:"ps%20"; nocase; classtype:web-application-attack; sid:1329; rev:6;)

We are in a position to download these rules into our proper snort_inline rules directory from last month. I strongly advise that you take a backup of your rules directory, before continuing beyond this point. I also suggest you move all custom rules that you may have been experimenting with into a file called local.rules. This is because OinkMaster will remove any rule that is not in the offical release, unless it is present in a separate file. This will constitute a modification to the snort_inline.conf file, which we will perform in a little while. Issuing the following command will perform the same process as before, but will now modify our actual snort_inline rules.

/usr/local/bin/oinkmaster.pl -o /etc/snort_inline/rules/

The output should be similar if not identical to that shown earlier. If we now run snort_inline, as we did previously, with the command...

snort_inline -c /etc/snort_inline/snort_inline.conf -Q -N -l /var/log/snort_inline/ \
	-t /var/log/snort_inline/ -v

...you may receive the following error;

ERROR: FLOWBITS ERROR: The number of flowbit IDs in the current ruleset exceed the maximum
number of IDs that are allowed.  Fatal Error, Quitting..

This is because the new rule set uses a rule where the number of flowbit tags exceeds snort_inline's configuration. Flowbits are used to keep track of the state of a TCP/IP connection. We can modify a line in the snort_inline configuration, to overcome this problem.

Load /etc/snort_inline/snort_inline.conf in your favorite editor, and add a line reading:

config flowbits_size: 256

If you now try running snort_inline again, you should be presented with the familiar;

        --== Initialization Complete ==--

If so, you have just used OinkMaster to update your snort_inline ruleset to the latest available from snort.org.

It would be beneficial, though, to have these updates happen automatically, so that the process is transparent to us. We are going to add this process to the cronjob routine and ensure that it happens every night. To do this, we will run the following command:

crontab -e

This will open cron's nightly jobs for the current user, this being root. We are going to use a slightly modified version of the command line used previously to start OinkMaster. Usually, when running a process as a cronjob, any output from this process is emailed to the cronjob's owner. Whilst this can be useful, it can also be annoying to receive an email every night, saying the same thing. We are going to suppress the output from the OinkMaster process, in order to save on mailbox space. You will need to add a line similar to the following to your crontab file:

55 00 * * * /usr/local/bin/oinkmaster.pl -o /etc/snort_inline/rules/ > /dev/null 2>&1 

The line above will run the update at 00:55 every night. Since most people are asleep at this time (apart from the ones writing this article), this is a good time to perform maintenance tasks. The '> /dev/null 2>& 1' appended to the end of this line routes all output to the /dev/null device, effectively ignoring it. On saving and exiting, you should see a line similar to the following:

crontab: installing new crontab

This indicates that your new cronjob has been successfully installed.

This would be a good time to try creating the local.rules file, and linking it in to your snort_inline configuration file. Follow the steps below to create a local.rules file:

touch /etc/snort_inline/rules/local.rules

Edit this file in your favorite editor, and add the following line to it;

drop tcp any any -> any 80 (classtype:attempted-user; msg:"Port 80 connection initiated";)

This will function in much the same way as the test performed in Part I: It would be useful to refer back to this article to help you here. We must restart the snort process as before.

To digress slightly from the topic at hand, it is worth noting that some portions of snort_inline are, as yet, not fully complete. I am referring to snort_inline's handling of certain shell-based connections. At the time of writing this article, there is a problem with, for example, telnet rule matching. The problem occurs because of the order in which the packets are processed. In the original snort, the network card is placed into promiscuous mode, allowing it to see all of the network traffic, but not alter it.

This is analogous to watching a conveyor belt of items whizzing past a man with a clipboard. The man sits down and notes any items that he believes are defective or troublesome, and reports these to his supervisor. Once the parts reach the end of the conveyor belt, they are assembled together to make a complete item.

In contrast, snort_inline actually interferes with the conveyor belt process. snort_inline picks the items up and examines them itself. This is where snort_inline does its content matching. The original snort also has a mechanism called stream4_reassemble. This is analogous to having a second man watching over the parts as they are assembled, at the end of the conveyor belt. This second quality-control checker can then check the whole assembly, to see if there are any problems.

The problem is that snort_inline functions with only one man in the middle of the conveyor belt. This has the effect that connections like telnet, where each character typed is sent as a separate packet, can bypass certain rules.

This occurs because dropping a connection when, for example, a user types 'to su root' (an actual snort rule, SID 715), would require the stream to be reassembled before the content matching can be performed. The man in the middle will just see, t - o - - s - u - - r - o - o - t, all of which seem perfectly acceptable. The original snort would see the finished stream at the end of the conveyor belt 'to su root', which would trigger an alert to the supervisor.

It is because of this that some of the snort_inline rules do not actually work, even at an alert level. Some people have suggested running two versions of snort, one for dropping and one for alerting. How you choose to implement and overcome this problem is up to you. However, there is word that the developers of snort_inline are working on this. It would require the handling of out-of-sequence packets.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could start, stop, and restart snort at the push of a button? Well, maybe we can't do it with just one button, but the current method takes too much time. It would be nice to have a startup script that would take care of loading ip_queue, creating the iptables rules, and starting the snort_inline daemon. I have written a very simple script to take care of this procedure. The script has been written with a Red Hat/Fedora system in mind. This being the case, it will not work on many of the other distributions. It is not difficult to create an init.d script. Use a current one as reference, and edit as necessary to learn the basics.

Let us take a brief look at the script below, to determine what each portion does and how it relates to our usual process, for starting and stopping snort_inline. The first few lines, with a # in front of them are comment lines. These will be ignored when the script is run, but a few are required in order to put snort_inline into the boot sequence. There are two source commands that load standard libraries. The first line of real interest is:

[ -f /usr/local/bin/snort_inline ] || exit 0

This checks to see if the snort_inline binary file actually exists. If the file is not present, the script aborts.

The start function first checks to see if the ip_queue module is loaded. If the module is not present, then it uses modprobe to load the module. As you will see, most of the commands in the startup script are similar, if not identical, to those used in last month's article. The echo statements in this script are simply there to produce the [ OK ]/[ FAILED ] lines that are displayed when an init.d script is run.

The next few commands differ from our standard procedure. Instead of simply creating a single rule for iptables, as we did previously, we are going to create an iptables group. This group will serve as a collection for all our iptables rules for snort_inline. Why you ask? When it comes to stopping the snort_inline service, we want our iptables rules to be removed as well. Instead of flushing the entire iptables rule set, we can simply flush our new group to remove our snort_inline rules.

        iptables -N ip_queue
        iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -j ip_queue
        iptables -I ip_queue -p tcp --dport 80 -j QUEUE

These three lines accomplish the following;
Line 1: Creates a new iptables group called ip_queue
Line 2: Routes all tcp input to this new group
Line 3: Adds our default rule for port 80 to be sent to the ip_queue

Last, the snort_inline binary is loaded via a fairly typical command line. Notice the word daemon has been added to the front. This starts snort_inline in background mode mode, detaching it from the terminal.

The stop function performs all of this, but in reverse. In other words, first the snort_inline process is stopped, then the iptables rules are flushed before finally removing the ip_queue module. Notice the way the iptables rules are flushed.

        iptables -F ip_queue
        iptables -D INPUT -p tcp -j ip_queue
        iptables -X ip_queue

Line 1: Flushes (deletes) all rules in the ip_queue group
Line 2: Removes the link from the INPUT queue to the ip_queue group
Line 3: Removes the ip_queue group

As can be seen from the script below, there is also a restart function, which performs the stop function, quickly followed by the start function. This will make our life much easier from now on. We are now able to add snort_inline to the startup sequence, allowing it to be run at boot time. The script should now be copied from below, or from this link, and should be placed in the /etc/init.d/ directory, and should be called snort_inline. The file must also be chmod 755 and both owned and group owned by root, else service will not use it. If you are unsure how to do this, once the file is created in /etc/init.d/, run the following commands;

chmod 755 /etc/init.d/snort_inline
chmod root.root /etc/init.d/snort_inline 

You should now test the startup script, to make sure it is running effectively. First, ensure that snort_inline isn't running and that iptables rules have been removed and ipqueue has been stopped. Then, run the following command:

service snort_inline start

Your snort_inline box should then display the lines below:

[root@localhost ~]# service snort_inline start
Starting ip_queue module:                                       [  OK  ]
Starting iptables rules:                                        [  OK  ]
Starting snort_inline: Reading from iptables
Initializing Inline mode                                        [  OK  ]
[root@localhost ~]#

Providing you see OKs down the line, you should be fine. If there are some [ FAILED ] remarks, you should run each command individually again. If you have typed the script out again by yourself, check for mistakes. If not, check to see if you have made any changes to directories, or last month's configuration.

We are now going to allow snort_inline to be run at boot time. It is important that you remember to add the chkconfig and description comment lines, as these are required by chkconfig in order to add it to the startup sequence. Issuing the command below will add snort_inline to the services handler in Red Hat/Fedora;

chkconfig snort_inline --add

This line adds snort_inline into the services database. Further, issuing...

chkconfig --levels 2345 snort_inline on

...will instruct the init daemon to load snort_inline, in run levels 234 and 5. In order to test this, you are going to have to reboot the server. You should, during the boot sequence, see the output from before flash by, indicating that the services have been started correctly. Incidentally, the...

# chkconfig: 2345 20 40 

...line determines the initial run levels in which snort_inline should be started, followed by the minimum start and stop priorities. These values work fine on this testing server, and shouldn't present a problem to you.

Please note that this is a very simple script, and should not be taken as a definitive init.d script. It just takes care of the essentials, and allows easy restarting of the snort_inline process.

As a final step, we will instruct crontab to restart the snort_inline daemon, once the downloading of the rules via OinkMaster has been completed. The OinkMaster script was set to run at 55 minutes past midnight. We will set snort_inline to restart half an hour later. Run the following command:

crontab -e

Now, edit this document, putting the snort_inline restart line below the OinkMaster command, as shown below.

55 00 * * * /usr/local/bin/oinkmaster.pl -o /etc/snort_inline/rules/ > /dev/null 2>&1 
25 01 * * * /sbin/service snort_inline restart > /dev/null 2>&1

The above lines redirect all of their output to the null process, thus basically ignoring it. It may be that you would like to see the output from these processes, in which case remove the '> /dev/null 2>&1' from the lines above. You are quite welcome to alter the times, also. Indeed, for testing purposes, it is probably best that you do.

Below is the script in its entirety:

#!/bin/bash
#
# chkconfig: 2345 20 40
# description: Snort_inline is an IPS implementation of the popular snort IDS package
# processname: snort_inline
# config: /etc/snort_inline/snort_inline.conf

# Source function library.
. /etc/init.d/functions

# Source networking configuration.
. /etc/sysconfig/network

[ -f /usr/local/bin/snort_inline ] || exit 0

start() {
        # Start daemons.
        echo -n $"Starting ip_queue module:"
        lsmod | grep ip_queue >/dev/null || /sbin/modprobe ip_queue;
        echo -e '\t\t\t\t   [  \033[32mOK\033[37m  ]'
        
        echo -n $"Starting iptables rules:"
        iptables -N ip_queue
        iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -j ip_queue
        #Add new IPTABLES rules here and they will be added into the ip_queue Ruleset
        iptables -I ip_queue -p tcp --dport 80 -j QUEUE

        echo -e '\t\t\t\t   [  \033[32mOK\033[37m  ]'
        echo -n $"Starting snort_inline: "
        daemon /usr/local/bin/snort_inline -c /etc/snort_inline/snort_inline.conf -Q -N -l \
		/var/log/snort_inline -t /var/log/snort_inline -D

        RETVAL=$?
        echo
        [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/snort_inline
}

stop() {
        # Stop daemons.
        echo -n $"Shutting down snort_inline: "
        killproc snort_inline
        echo -ne $"\nRemoving iptables rules:"
        iptables -F ip_queue
        iptables -D INPUT -p tcp -j ip_queue
        iptables -X ip_queue
        echo -e '\t\t\t\t   [  \033[32mOK\033[37m  ]'
        echo -n $"Unloading ip_queue module:"
        rmmod ip_queue
        echo -en '\t\t\t\t   [  \033[32mOK\033[37m  ]'

        RETVAL=$?
        echo
        [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/subsys/snort_inline
}

restart() {
        stop
        start
}

# Arguments passed.
case "$1" in
  start)
        start
        ;;
  stop)
        stop
        ;;
  restart)
        restart
        ;;
  *)
        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|}"
        exit 1
esac

exit $RETVAL

So, in summary, I must apologize for not getting to custom rules. It is on next month's agenda for snort_inline Part III. I had several emails about both custom rules and, indeed, simple ways to start and restart snort_inline.

 

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Pete has been programming since the age of 10 on an old Atari 800 XE. Though he took an Acoustical Engineering degree from the world-renowned ISVR in Southampton UK, the call of programming brought him back and he has been working as a Web developer ever since. He uses both Linux and Windows platforms. He still lives in the UK, and is currently living happily with his wife.