You make a good point about the utilization. It just occurred to me that it
may be preferable to overload a sensor by feeding it too many packets,
rather than dropping packets in a switch somewhere because aggregate
bandwidth exceeds the sensor port.

That way, at least you can tell from the sensor if it is keeling over and
you are loosing packets. If the infrastructure was silently dropping packets
you'd probably only know or infer overload from periodic samples.


-----Original Message-----
From: Birol Ertekin [mailto:birol@;etcnetworks.com]
Sent: 14 November 2002 16:28
To: Rowton, Mitchell; as dsf
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [ISSForum] Basic IDS Deployment Questions


It all depends on your network utilization.
Even you connected the server to Gigabit ports does not mean they work at
Gigabit speed, you have to find out the utilization. 
If all ports are running over 100 mbps , even you have the Gigabit Sensor,
it will drop some of the packets. Then best way for this scneario is to
mirror only the firewall port, or to use network taps.

If all ports are running a few mbps not exceeding 10 mbps or the network
overall utilization is at most 67-70 mbps at a time( which is pretty normal
as most of the organizations' bottleneck is the internet conection - if the
servers in the DMZ are not utilized by internal users-) then you can mirror
all the ports even with a 100 mbps IDS.

Mirroring all ports will enable you to monitor internal traffic on that
network, but for all the attacks in and out of that network you'll see the
attack twice in the IDS logs as you mirror both the server and the firewall.
The log database will filled up twice faster then just monitoring the
firewall, as most of the attacks will be in and out of that network.


Birol Ertekin
Network Security Engineer,
/etc/networks inc.




-----Original Message-----
From: Rowton, Mitchell [mailto:Mitchell.Rowton@;mail.drms.dla.mil]
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 8:51 AM
To: 'as dsf'
Cc: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: RE: [ISSForum] Basic IDS Deployment Questions


a bit of input for one part of your question...

If you mirror every port in the switch then you can monitor trafic to and
from internal machines, if you only mirror the firewall port then you will
only monitor the traffic leaving the network (to its default GW)

-----Original Message-----
From: as dsf [mailto:xpidissii@;yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 9:11 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ISSForum] Basic IDS Deployment Questions


It happens that I am currently discussing a
implementation where I have a basic deployment of
Checkpoint Fw-1:

           
                     (Internet)
                          +
                        Router
                          + 
                     Firewall
                          + 
                + - - - - +- - - - -+
                +                   +
(TrustedZone-Switch)          (DMZ-Switch)




There's a firewall interface in every zone , that's in
every switch dedicated to each security zone.Each of
the switches is a Gigabit switch, with servers
connected to them with gigabit nics.IDS implementation
involves configuring an IDS Network Sensor in every
zone (Tz,Dmz,Public Zone)Questions:1.Mirroring:Is it
enough to mirror Firewall Interface on Network Sensor
for each zone or all of the ports in a given
switch.For instance, for DMZ switch with 10 servers
connected to it, should I mirror only the firewall
interface to DMZ-network sensor or should I mirror all
the 10 ports to it?Obviously , every server has one of
the firewall interface as default gateway.2.What if
set up network sensor with a 100FullDuplex interface,
is there any great chance nbetwork sensor drop a huge
amount of packets? Has anyone estimated this loss of
capture by network sensor?JaimeO.

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