Re: IPS - Cisco vs. McAfee vs. Tippingpoint

[Laurens Vets <laurens () daemon be>]

Hey Andre,

> i need to protect a "realtime" website with an inline IPS from (D)DOS attacks.

That's going to be though with an IPS...

> I had some bad experience with Tippingpoint UnityOne 2400 field test. The device dropped to much sessions until all connectivity was lost. 
> After that no investigation was not possible as TP logs all attack information with IP address 0.0.0.0 
>
> The vendor excused this with the layered technology and passing the IP address from the hardware to the logger would 
> lead to delayed packages)
>
> This is unacceptable.
>
> i'm now looking forward to test a Cisco IPS 4270-20 and a McAfee Network Security 4050 appliance. 
>
> Who has a good/bad experience with that devices? Is it true that all devices don't log ip adresses?

If you want to block a DDOS with an IPS, good luck with that :) 
Normally, most devices do log source and destination addresses. 
However, depending on the alert generated by the IPS, you still might 
see 0.0.0.0 as source for instance. This means that the alert triggered 
with a lot of different source addresses.

> My dream appliance would be able to run like in a 7 day learning mode which counts max new sessions per second, max 
> sessions per client aso. After this 7 days it creates a filter with +x% of the learned values and sets these limits 
> active.

I don't think any of the systems mentioned above can actually do this. 
I'll talk in general terms as I only have experience with Cisco (and 
other IPSses you didn't mention).

IPSes inspect traffic for defined patterns in that traffic. They will 
generally see that there's a lot of traffic when there's a (D)DOS (and 
can report some of it. E.g it will notice a SYN flood for instance), but 
if the traffic is legitimate (e.g. 'normal' HTTP requests to 
http://company.com, but coming from a lot of different sources) it won't 
"see" anything bad and can't take action on this traffic.
I don't think a Cisco IPS can do statistical analysis of the traffic 
(E.g. "alert when this type of traffic has an 80% increase over the last 
2 hours").

If an IPS sees too much packets to process (legitimate or not), it will 
either drop them or pass them unanalyzed.

> A big problem is that i have to install it into the productive system to get the real values. I dont have any fixed values regarding the new sessions per second and i cant just guess and set values and render the system offline. 

Most inline IPSes can be put inline without actually blocking anything, 
usually called learning mode or monitoring mode.

Hope this helps a bit.

-Laurens

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