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Developer(s) | Daniel B. Cid et al. |
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Stable release | 3.7.0 [1] / 17 January 2022 |
Repository | |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Type | Security / HIDS |
License | GNU GPL v2 |
Website | www.ossec.net |
OSSEC (Open Source HIDS SECurity) is a free, open-source host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS). It performs log analysis, integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, rootkit detection, time-based alerting, and active response. It provides intrusion detection for most operating systems, including Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris and Windows. OSSEC has a centralized, cross-platform architecture allowing multiple systems to be easily monitored and managed. [2] OSSEC has a log analysis engine that is able to correlate and analyze logs from multiple devices and formats. [3]
In June 2008, the OSSEC project and all the copyrights owned by Daniel B. Cid, the project leader, were acquired by Third Brigade, Inc. They promised to continue to contribute to the open source community and to extend commercial support and training to the OSSEC open source community.
In May 2009, Trend Micro acquired Third Brigade and the OSSEC project, with promises to keep it open source and free.
In 2018, Trend released the domain name and source code to the OSSEC Foundation.
The OSSEC project is currently maintained by Atomicorp who stewards the free and open source version and also offers a commercial version.
OSSEC consists of a main application, an agent, and a web interface. [4]
An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a device or software application that monitors a network or systems for malicious activity or policy violations. Any intrusion activity or violation is typically either reported to an administrator or collected centrally using a security information and event management (SIEM) system. A SIEM system combines outputs from multiple sources and uses alarm filtering techniques to distinguish malicious activity from false alarms.
A rootkit is a collection of computer software, typically malicious, designed to enable access to a computer or an area of its software that is not otherwise allowed and often masks its existence or the existence of other software. The term rootkit is a compound of "root" and the word "kit". The term "rootkit" has negative connotations through its association with malware.
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Zeek is a free and open-source software network analysis framework. Vern Paxson began development work on Zeek in 1995 at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Zeek is a network security monitor (NSM) but can also be used as a network intrusion detection system (NIDS). The Zeek project releases the software under the BSD license.
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Tiger is a security software for Unix-like computer operating systems. It can be used both as a security audit tool and a host-based intrusion detection system and supports multiple UNIX platforms. Tiger is free under the GPL license and unlike other tools, it needs only of POSIX tools, and is written entirely in shell language.
Sagan is an open source (GNU/GPLv2) multi-threaded, high performance, real-time log analysis & correlation engine developed by Quadrant Information Security that runs on Unix operating systems. It is written in C and uses a multi-threaded architecture to deliver high performance log & event analysis. Sagan's structure and rules work similarly to the Sourcefire Snort IDS/IPS engine. This allows Sagan to be compatible with Snort or Suricata rule management softwares and give Sagan the ability to correlate with Snort IDS/IPS data.
Comparison of host-based intrusion detection system components and systems.