Victor Julien, Suricata and Netfilter

Suricata and Netfilter can be better friend as they are doing some common work like decoding packet and maintaining flow table.

In IPS mode, Suricata is receiving raw packet from libnetfilter_queue. It has to made the parsing of this packet but this kind of thing has also been done by kernel. So it should be possible to avoid to duplicate the work.

In fact Netfilter work is limited as ipheaders srtucture are used. Patrik McHardy proposed that Netfilter offset but this is not the most costly part.

The flow discussion was more interesting because conntrack is really doing a similar work as the one done by Suricata. Using the CT extension of libnetfilter_queue, Suricata will be able to get access to all the CT information. And at a first glance, it seems it contains almost all information needed. So it should be possible to remove the flow engine from suricata. The garbage operation would not be necessary as Suricata will get information via NFCT destroy event.

Jozsef Kadlecsik proposed to use Tproxy to redirect flow and provide a “socket” stream instead of individual packet to Suricata. This would change Suricata a lot but could provide a interesting alternative mode.

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