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This documentation is no longer maintained and exists for historical purposes. The current documentation is located at http://suricata.readthedocs.io/.

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Ignoring Traffic¶

In some cases there are reasons to ignore certain traffic. Maybe a trusted host or network, or a site. This document lists some strategies for ignoring traffic.

capture filters (BPF)¶

Through BPFs the capture methods pcap, af-packet and pf_ring can be told what to send to Suricata, and what not. For example a simple filter 'tcp' will only send tcp packets.

If some hosts and or nets need to be ignored, use something like "not (host IP1 or IP2 or IP3 or net NET/24)".

pass rules¶

Pass rules are Suricata rules that if matching, pass the packet and in case of TCP the rest of the flow. They look like normal rules, except that instead of 'alert' or 'drop' they start with 'pass'.

Example:

pass ip 1.2.3.4 any <> any any (msg:"pass all traffic from/to 1.2.3.4"; sid:1;)

A big difference with capture filters is that logs such as http.log are still generated for this traffic.

suppress¶

Suppress rules can be used to make sure no alerts are generated for a host. This is not efficient however, as the suppression is only considered post-matching. In other words, Suricata first inspects a rule, and only then will it consider per-host suppressions.

Example:

suppress gen_id 0, sig_id 0, track by_src, ip 1.2.3.4