The third SELKS is out

Yes, we did it: the most awaited SELKS 3.0 is out. This is the first stable release of this new branch that brings you the latest Suricata and Elastic stack technology.

SELKS is both Live and installable Network Security Management ISO based on Debian implementing and focusing on a complete and ready to use Suricata IDS/IPS ecosystem with its own graphic rule manager. Stamus Networks is a proud member of the Open Source community and SELKS is released under GPLv3 license.

Main changes and new features

Suricata 3.1.1

SELKS 3.0 comes with latest Suricata namely 3.1.1 bringing a big performance boost as well as some new IDS and NSM capabilities.

Elasticsearch 2.x and Kibana 4

But the main change in SELKS 3.0 is the switch to the latest generation of the Elastic stack. On user side this means Kibana 3 has been replaced by Kibana 4. And this really means a lot. Kibana 4 is a complete rewrite of Kibana 3 being non backward compatible on data side. So, our team had to redo from scratch all dashboards and visualizations. The result is a new set of 11 ready-to-use dashboards and a lots of visualizations that you can use to build your own dashboards.

Latest Scirius Community Edition

On the ruleset management side, SELKS 3.0 comes with Scirius Community Edition 1.1.10 that has support for advanced Suricata feature like xbits.

Scirius CE also brings thresholding and suppression support as well as an integrated backup system which allows for back up to be done (besides locally) in locations such as :

• FTP
• Amazon AWS
• Dropbox

Evebox

SELKS 3.0 comes with Evebox an alert management/viewer/report interface for Suricata that presents events as a mailbox to provide classification via acknowledgement and escalade.

One of the other interesting features of Evebox is the capability to create and export pcap generated from events:

Features list

• Suricata IDS/IPS/NSM  - Suricata 3.1.1 packaged.
• Elasticsearch 2.3.5  - latest available ES edition featuring speed, scalability, security improvements and more.
• Logstash 2.3.4 - performance improvement ES 2.3 compatability, dynamically reload pipelines on the fly and more
• Kibana 4.5.4 - taking advantage of the latest features and performance improvement of ES
• Scirius 1.1.10 - support for xbits, hostbits, thresholding, suppression, backup and more
• Evebox - alert management/viewer/report interface for Suricata/ES  allowing easy export of payload/packets into pcaps
• 4.4.x longterm kernel - SELKS 3.0 comes by default with 4.4.16 kernel.
• Dashboards - reworked dashboards with flow and rule correlation capability.

SELKS comes with 11 ready to use Kibana dashboards. More than 190 visualizations are available to mix, match, customize and make your own dashboards as well.

Please feel free to try it out, spread the word, feedback and let's talk about SELKS 3.0.

To get you started

Once downloaded and installed, you can get access to all components via https://your.selks.IP.here/

The default user and password for both web interface and system is:

• user: selks-user
• password: selks-user

The default root password is StamusNetworks.

Please note that in Live mode the password for the selks-user system user is live.

Upgrades

There is no direct upgrade path from SELKS 2.0 to SELKS 3.0 due to a number of breaking and compatibility changes in Elasticsearch 1.x to 2.x and Kibana 3.x to 4.x. The only proposed upgrade path is SELKS 3.0RC1 upgrade to SELKS 3.0

More about SELKS 3.0

• Download SELKS 3.0
• Get help on Freenode IRC on the #SELKS channel and/or  Google Mailing list.