Cisco Secure : Snort2 Vs Snort3

Cisco Secure : Snort2 Vs Snort3

What is snort IPS?
The world's leading Open Source Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is Snort. Snort IPS examines packets to find packets that match malicious network activity and generates alerts for users based on the matching rules.

You can also deploy Snort inline to stop these packets. As a packet sniffer, Snort is similar to tcpdump, it can be used as a packet logger, helpful for network traffic analysis, or it can function as a network intrusion prevention system in its entirety.

Fig 1.1- Cisco Snort IPS

Both personal and business users can download and configure Snort. Now lets discuss on Snort 2 and Snort 3 and the difference between them.

Note: Snort2 and Snort3 only differ in the format of their IPS rules.

Cisco Secure : Snort2
Snort2 uses multiple Snort processes for management and data handling, each with its own thread. Snort processes are each associated with one CPU core.

Cisco Secure : Snort3
As an alternative, Snort3 runs in one process, with each thread corresponding to a single CPU core, backed by a single control thread that handles data for all packet-processing threads.

Snort3 makes use of multiple threads to enable data/configuration sharing among all threads, eliminating the need for a control thread per process. As a consequence, an orchestration of the collaboration among packet-processing threads is simplified.

Here is the difference showing in the table below

Fig 1.2- Snort2 Vs Snort3

As this is basics on Cisco Snort, we will come up with more details, troubleshooting and other information on Cisco Snort.