IDS mailing list archives

Re: Intrusion Detection Evaluation Datasets


From: Damiano Bolzoni <damiano.bolzoni () utwente nl>
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:01:48 +0100

On 16/03/2009 19.39, Paul Schmehl wrote:

Unless you can be more specific, I'm going to call your claim bogus. It
is entirely possible to write one snort signature that will detect
*every* instance of an attempt to overflow a buffer in a particular
applicaiton no matter what the attack "signature" is. You just have to
understand the snort logic and syntax and understand packet analysis
well enough.

I don't see the words "buffer overflow" in my post, so maybe it's possible to write a signature to catch *any* instances exploiting a certain buffer overflow...but I'm more interested in the following. Can you write a *single* signature to detect this:

POST / HTTP/1.1

...
Content-Length: N (1000 <= N <= 204800)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA....

or

BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB....

or

11111111111111111111.....

(N times the same byte value, and each request a different byte)


I would be really thankful (and I'm not being sarcastic).

And yes, I know exactly which IDS you're referring to. They also claim
to have the best vulnerability scanner on the market - one we found so
useless we trashed it after spending ridiculous amounts of money and
insance amounts of effort trying to get it to work. If that's any
indication of how well their IDS works, I wouldn't give it the time of
day, much less a fair evaluation.

I didn't say their IDS can detect any attack instances, and I didn't say it's the best out there. I'm not aware of the performance of their vulnerability scanner, and I would say that inferring the "quality" of an IDS from the quality of a VA tool is like comparing apples to oranges.

--
Damiano Bolzoni

damiano.bolzoni () utwente nl
Homepage http://dies.ewi.utwente.nl/~bolzonid/
PGP public key http://dies.ewi.utwente.nl/~bolzonid/public_key.asc
Skype ID: damiano.bolzoni () utwente nl

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