Snort mailing list archives

Re: PCRE and cross packet matching


From: "vpiserchia () gmail com" <vpiserchia () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:34:48 +0200

Hello Patrick, Tony

Thank you for your exhaustive answers.

Before all I have to say that the first experiments were made with the
PFRING DAQ
module and I can confirm that in this case the PCRE signature is not
able to match a cross packet content.

The way I launched snort is like this:

snort --pid-path /root/snort/ -D \
        -c /etc/snort/snort.conf -i eth1,eth2 \
        -l /root/snort/ -A fast \
        --daq-dir /opt/daq/lib/daq --daq pfring --daq-mode passive


Today I made more tests and changed a bit the setup of my experiments,
that is now I use the "standard" PCAP DAQ module
in this way:

snort --pid-path /root/snort/ -D \
        -c /etc/snort/snort.conf -i eth1,eth2 \
        -l /root/snort/ -A fast \
        --daq-dir /opt/daq/lib/daq --daq pcap --daq-mode passive


with this setup the PCRE signature now works well and alert as expected

So my new question for the list is:
has anyone already experienced this behaviour with the pfring daq module
and pcre signatures?

best regards
vito



On 08/03/2012 05:58 PM, Tony Robinson wrote:
Just to further explain Patrick's message,

While it isn't explicitly spelled out, Patrick is more or less
referring to frag3 and stream 5. If you utilize ip defragmentation,
and stream reassembly, we have an entire TCP stream that the rule can
work against. If frag3/s5 are not being used to defragment/reassemble
packets and TCP segments, you will only have individual packets to
work with.

A good, general rule of thumb for using PCRE in this instance is to
have some sort of a content match prior to using PCRE so snort knows
where in the packet or stream to use the PCRE engine to shred through
the data from that point onward, so you don't run into the problem of
snort giving up on a PCRE match.

hope this helps,

-Tony

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 9:53 AM, vpiserchia () gmail com
<mailto:vpiserchia () gmail com> <vpiserchia () gmail com
<mailto:vpiserchia () gmail com>> wrote:

    Hello Snort Gurus

    I have the following question for you:

    does snort pcre signatures match cross-packets content?

    I googled a bit and no other answers found about this topic, sry if aI
    missed any

    regards
    vito piserchia



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