Re: Firewall and IDS, (the second way).

From: Timothy J. Miller (cerebusat_private)
Date: Sat Mar 16 2002 - 10:52:20 PST

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    On Fri, 2002-03-15 at 12:41, sekureat_private wrote:
    
    > I'm "walking" by the internet finding about paper/techniques that can be
    > used to detect systemn with IDS installed. Try to detect
    > snort/snort+aide/quinds/.../ somebody know something like it ??
    
    There's only two ways of detecting an IDS that I know.
    
    1) Look for the data stream from a remote sensor (sniffer) to wherever
    it's stored and/or analyzed, or look for the alerts generated by the
    IDS.
    
    This isn't very useful, since it presupposes some measure of access to
    the network in question.  And if you've already got that, the IDS has
    probably already alerted on you unless you're very, very paranoid and
    very, very skilled.
    
    2) Timing detection.  AntiSniff from l0pht uses this method.  
    
    The theory goes like this:  a network card usually discards ethernet
    frames not destined for it, without passing those frames into software
    processing.  A card in promiscuous mode will process and forward up the
    stack *all* frames.  
    
    So, you spend time pinging all systems on a network and collect the
    average timing.  Then you flood the network with garbage packets.  NICs
    not in promiscuous mode will ignore the trash, but any operating sniffer
    will process them all, slowing the system some (hopefully) measurable
    mount.  In the middle of the flood, you ping everything again.  Any
    system that shows a statistically significant deviation from previous
    timings is likely running a sniffer.
    
    This also isn't very useful for remote sniffer detection.  You need
    access to the local network to inject all the garbage packets, and it's
    noisy as hell.  (Attempting to do this from *outside* the local segment
    fails because normal variation in RTTs in the wild internet makes the
    collected ping timing statistics useless to begin with.)  Additionally,
    varying load on other non-sniffer systems can lead to false positives. 
    This is primarily useful for a network admin to check a segment and see
    if any *un*authorized sniffers have been installed.
    
    Both methods are completely useless against sniffers that have no IP
    address, or have out-of-band monitoring/alerting.  Which is how they all
    should be installed anyway.  8)
    



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