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Import PCAP with IDS

Applies to

Packet capture mode, with Snort or Suricata installed on the Probe node.

Runs a PCAP dump and indexes Trisul’s statistics, flow, and packet data with IDS alerts.

Two Pass Analysis​

The tool included in the trisul-probe package called importpcap_ids is used to import a PCAP dump. The tool essentially orchestrates a 2-pass analysis over the PCAP dump. It looks like the following.

  1. First pass — Trisul runs over the PCAP files and builds statistics, flows, traffic, packets, and all the other analytics.

  2. Second pass — Snort/Suricata run over the PCAP files, sends alerts to Trisul via a Unix Socket, and Trisul integrates the alerts with the statistics computed in the first pass.

trisulctl_probe importpcap_ids​

Snort or Suricata install

To proceed further you need to have Snort or Suricata installed on the probe node with all the rules that you want to use.

Logon to the Trisul-Probe node where you have the PCAP dumps and run the following command.

trisulctl_probe importpcap_ids /home/trisul/dumps/MassivePacket.pcap context=mass1

This command does the following

  • if a context called mass1 does not exist; creates it
  • if mass1 exists, it cleans it (ask you permission first)
  • runs the PCAP through trisulctl_probe and into the context mass1
  • runs the IDS over the same PCAPs and sends alert to Trisul
  • to view the results, log in to WebTrisul and select mass1

Some additional limitations of the IDS tools :

  1. you need to put all PCAP files in one directory
  2. the PCAP files need to be named in “time order”
  3. the files cannot be .gz or .bz2, you need to uncompress them.
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