Re: Pattern Matching

[Todd Wease <twease () sourcefire com>]

Hi Rayne,

Answers inline...

Rayne wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have a few questions regarding the pattern matching aspect of Snort.
>
> 1) If I have the following rule option (content:"ABC",
> content:"DEFGH"), am I right to say that the string "DEFGH" will be
> compared first to see if there is a match, and if there is, then "ABC"
> is compared, because "DEFGH" is the longer string?

The fast pattern matcher (ac-bnfa, lowmem, etc.) is used to find the
rules that have a chance at matching.  Only the longest content of each
rule is put in the pattern matcher.  After the pattern matcher is
compiled, each match state points to a tree of rule options with each
path in the tree from root to leaf containing the rule options for a
unique rule (besides the descriptive options such as msg, sid, etc.). 
Note that a match state can contain more than one pattern, e.g. "ABCD",
"BCD", "CD".  A tree is used because many rule options are present in
the same place in different rules and using a tree eliminates the need
to evaluate these options more than once.  Each path in the tree will
contain a content rule option containing one of the patterns in the
match state.  The contents are evaluated again using boyer-moore because
of the usual modifiers to the content indicating the relativity, depth
and case.  So in your rule above, the content "DEFGH" will be put in the
fast pattern matcher.  If that content is found in the payload, a tree
will be traversed (essentially a linked list here), starting with
content:"ABC".  That content will be evaluated using boyer-moore.  If
that succeeds, then content:"DEFGH" will be evaluated using
boyer-moore.  Note that the results of each rule option evaluated (each
node in the tree) get cached for each packet so if "DEFGH" occurs
multiple times in the payload, the previous results for the rule options
will be used with the caveat that if the content (or pcre) is relative,
it will need to be evaluated again.

> 2) Is it possible to have one rule activate another rule within the
> same packet, i.e. when a content match with "AB" is found, it will
> trigger another rule that consists of a content match with a longer
> string, e.g. "CDEFG". This would be something similar to
> activate/dynamic, except from what I understand, dynamic only logs a
> certain number of subsequent packets that match the first rule after
> being activated, which is not exactly what I want to do. If this is
> possible, does the second content match start from the beginning of
> the payload, or from where "AB" was matched?

Not sure why you wouldn't put these contents in the same rule.  Can you
give an example of a couple of rules?

> 3) Say I have 5 rules each with one content match. All the rule
> headers are the same, i.e. the 5 OTNs are under the same RTN, and they
> contain only the content match. Using the AC search method, does Snort
> build just one DFA that contains all 5 strings so each packet can be
> searched through only once for all 5 strings at a time, or is a DFA
> built for every OTN/string, resulting in searching through each packet
> 5 times? What if one of the rules has 3 content matches while the
> other 4 has only one content match each. How is the DFA built then?

All contents are searched for simultaneously in one state machine.  Only
the longest content in a rule is used in the state machine.

> 4) Does the pattern matching algorithm return the position within the
> payload where the pattern is found? For example, if I'm matching for
> the string "GET" and the payload is "kas sdfGETjkdn", will I get
> something like "Pattern "GET" matched at position 8"? Also, in
> acsmx.c, it is mentioned that the AC algorithm "finds all occurrences
> of all patterns within a body of text". If there are, say, 5
> occurences of a pattern string, do I get one alert/log per occurence,
> one alert/log per pattern matched (if there are multiple content
> strings in the rule option) or one alert/log per rule (regardless of
> the number of content strings in the rule option)?

The index or position in the payload where the pattern matched is not
used for evaluating rules.  Generally, it's not important since content
modifiers specify where in the payload a content should be.  As I said
above, the fast pattern matcher is just a way to pick out a much smaller
subset of rules to evaluate.

Snort alerts per rule matched, not per pattern matched.

> 5) How long does Snort hold fragments for reassembly in Frag3 and
> Stream5 before discarding the packets if they are incomplete?

For frag3, fragments are discarded if a timeout is reached (default of
60 seconds).  frag3 does not constantly go through the current fragment
trackers looking for timed out ones (a performance hit) but makes this
decision if it gets a fragment for one of the trackers.  If the memory
cap is reached in trying to create a new tracker, it will purge the
least recently used trackers to get enough memory to create the new
one.  stream5 does essentially the same thing, but will flush the
segments it has gathered, reassembling into a pseudo-packet and sending
to the preprocessors and detection engine (only if timeout is reached,
not memcap).

> Thank you.
>
> Regards,
> Rayne
>
>
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