Suricata 0.8.2 released
Today the OISF development team released 0.8.2 of the Suricata IDS/IPS engine. I feel this is definitely the best release so far. Read the announcement here. In short, stability was improved, memory footprint reduced, performance improved and new features were added.
One of the tools we used to help improve the engine is a fuzzer created by Will Metcalf, our QA lead. In short, the script takes a pcap file, runs it through editcap (part of wireshark) altering a number of random bytes, then feeds the altered pcap file to Suricata. This resulted in many interesting corner cases. Naturally the script makes sure you don’t forget to enable “ulimit -c unlimited” and such :) More on that script can be found on Will’s blog node5.
For the next period we’ll be working on resolving a number of open issues. There are still a number of improvements we need to make to the relation between our app layer decoding modules and our detection engine. Next to this we’re still missing support for a number of rule keywords, such as asn1 and http_headers. We’re also working on getting our CUDA accelaration into a more usable shape. This release improved it slightly, by making it work on x86_64, but it’s still not useful in production environments.
So as usual, enough to do! Meanwhile, we’re looking for feedback on our release!