Suricata is a network intrusion detection and prevention engine developed by the Open Information Security Foundation and its supporting vendors.


Several characteristics of Suricata make it appropriate for tackling today’s security threats including:

• An open source engine. The power of the community works well within IT security defenses, as a community is more effective than a single organization at capturing characteristics of emerging threats.
• Multi-threaded. A multi-threaded architecture allows the engine to take advantage of the multiple core and multiple processor architectures of today’s systems.
• Supports IP reputation. By incorporating reputation and signatures into its engine, Suricata can flag traffic from known nefarious origins.
• Automated protocol detection. Preprocessors automatically identify the protocol used in a network stream and apply the appropriate rules, regardless of numerical port.

New features in version 1.3 include:

• TLS/SSL handshake parser and rule keywords for detecting anomolies in TLS/SSL traffic
• HTTP user agent keyword for matching directly on User-Agent header
• On the fly MD5 calculation and matching for files in HTTP streams.