A Realistic Experimental Comparison of the Suricata and Snort Intrusion-Detection Systems
Loading...
Authors
Albin, Eugene
Rowe, Neil C.
Subjects
intrusion detection
computer networks
Snort
Suricata
performance
computer networks
Snort
Suricata
performance
Advisors
Date of Issue
2012-03
Date
March 2012
Publisher
Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
The Suricata intrusion-detection system for computer-network monitoring has been advanced as an open-source improvement
on the popular Snort system that has been available for over a decade. Suricata includes multi-threading to improve processing speed
beyond Snort. Previous work comparing the two products has not used a real-world setting. We did this and evaluated the speed,
memory requirements, and accuracy of the detection engines in three kinds of experiments: (1) on the full traffic of our school as
observed on its "backbone" in real time; (2) on a supercomputer with packets recorded from the backbone; and (3) in response to
malicious packets sent by a red-teaming product. We used the same set of rules for both products with a few small exceptions where
capabilities were missing. We conclude that Suricata can handle larger volumes of traffic than Snort with similar accuracy, and that its
performance scaled roughly linearly with the number of processors up to 48. We observed no significant speed or accuracy advantage of
Suricata over Snort in its current state, but it is still being developed. Our methodology should be useful for comparing other intrusiondetection
products.
Type
Conference Paper
Description
This paper appeared in the Eighth International Symposium on the Frontiers of Information Systems and Network Applications, Fukuoka,
Japan, March 2012.
Series/Report No
Department
Computer Science (CS)
Organization
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funder
Format
Citation
Distribution Statement
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.