Re: SourceFire Appliance 3D9900 capabilities

[Jason Wallace <jason.r.wallace () gmail com>]

There is no integer answer to that question for any IPS. If any IPS
vender ever tells you differently, you should just get up and walk out
of the room.

It depends on what kind of traffic the sensor would see (not just the
volume), what is the quality of that traffic from a
fragmentation/session perspective, what do you want to look
for/protect from, number of resources given to a detection engine,
what preprocessors will you need to run, number of ports that need to
be tracked by stream5, and what the overhead of the rules your running
are... just to name a few.

In SF devices, each rule has a "Rule Overhead" rating (low, medium,
high, very high). While this probably isn't a scientific numerical
rating (correct me if I'm wrong here), it isn't some random attribute
either. You would probably be able to run far fewer "Very High" rules
than "Low" rules (hmmm that gives me an idea for a feature request).

Thx,
Wally

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 7:40 AM, d a <xstoneheartx () yahoo com> wrote:
> Dose anybody know, how many enabled rules are supported with SourceFire
> Appliance 3D9900 on 10 gbps traffic rate?
>
> ________________________________
> From: Martin Holste <mcholste () gmail com>
> To: d a <xstoneheartx () yahoo com>
> Cc: Nigel Houghton <nhoughton () sourcefire com>;
> snort-devel () lists sourceforge net
> Sent: Sat, April 9, 2011 8:30:13 AM
> Subject: Re: [Snort-devel] using snort for 10Gbps traffic rate
>
> My rule of thumb thus far has been that on commodity hardware with
> PF_RING, you can run 1000 signatures per 500 Mb/sec of traffic per
> Snort instance before you start dropping packets.  You want to run
> 20x500, so I would think that a single Snort instance could run 50
> signatures at 10 gig.  However, you're definitely going to need
> PF_RING or TNAPI and a recent network card, or better yet a 10 gig
> Endace DAG card to process packet headers at 10 gig.  Also,
> preprocessors will take a heavy toll; I cannot vouch for a Snort
> process running even zero rules with all preprocessors turned on to
> perform at 10 gig with no drops.  If anyone on the list has
> successfully run a single Snort instance against a full 10 gig
> line-speed of real-world traffic, I'd like to hear it.  Many run at
> the 1-3 Gb/sec range, but few run at full 10 gig line-speed.
>
> Something to consider: the PF_RING DAQ module allows multiple Snort
> processes to load balance the traffic so that you can have a cluster
> of Snort instances on a single machine.  DAG cards allow a similar
> load-balancing to occur.
>
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 10:39 PM, d a <xstoneheartx () yahoo com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Can the snort2-9 package be used for protecting 10Gbps traffic rate
> > without
> > need to use parallel snort sensors and breaking (splitting) traffic
> > between
> > them? Can a single snort engine handle this rate? If yes, so still with
> > the
> > assumption of no limitation in hardware and simplest configuration, how
> > many
> > rules approximately can be enabled to handle this rate with acceptable
> > packet drops rate, acceptable CPU usage,…?
> >
> > The reason that I insist on this topic is because what I found in
> > documents
> > and papers about snort performance and its supported rate, all were about
> > less that 1Gbps and there were some solutions to develop a hardware
> > accelerator for it to support 10Gbps rate.
> >
> >
> >
> > Thank you very much for your helps.
> >
> > ________________________________
> > From: Nigel Houghton <nhoughton () sourcefire com>
> > To: d a <xstoneheartx () yahoo com>
> > Cc: matan monitz <mmonitz () gmail com>; snort-devel () lists sourceforge net
> > Sent: Tue, April 5, 2011 7:49:53 PM
> > Subject: Re: [Snort-devel] using snort for an IDS/IPS appliance
> >
> > On Tue, 5 Apr 2011 07:37:38 -0700 (PDT), d a wrote:
> > > I know that sourcefire has a product for this purpose but that is a
> > > commercial product while what we want to do is not a commercial
> > > project it's an experimental and research project and as far as I
> > > know sourcefire is using another generation of snort (3D) for their
> > > appliance not exclusively snort2-9  software.
> >
> > The Snort that is on a Sourcefire appliance is the same Snort that you
> > can download from snort.org. There is no "special Snort".
> >
> > --
> > Nigel Houghton
> > Head Mentalist
> > SF VRT Department of Intelligence Excellence
> > http://vrt-blog.snort.org/ && http://labs.snort.org/
> >
> >
> >
> >
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priority.Virtualization can reduce costs, simplify management, and improve 
application availability and disaster protection. Learn more about boosting 
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