HOST Sponsors OISF
Suricata ID/IPS Engine Development

The Suricata open source intrusion Detection/Intrusion Prevention System (ID/IPS) was developed and released by the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF). The Suricata engine was developed and is maintained by an international team of software developers, security experts, quality assurance and performance testing experts who coordinated through the non-profit OISF. OISF is sponsored in part by the Department of Homeland Security's Directorate for Science and Technology HOST program (Homeland Open Security Technology). The Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program is designed to help federal, state and local government agencies realize technical, security and economic benefits made available through open source and open technology solutions.

A core goal of the OISF is to introduce many long-requested features in intrusion detection and prevention technology, including reputation sharing, and other distributed capabilities that will allow groups of devices to operate together, for example to better detect the types distributed denial of service attacks recently used in foreign cyber-attacks against several government and commercial websites within the United States.

“OISF was established to fill a gap created when the company which controls the original open source IDS project changed the terms of their license which restricted access to those interested in contributing to the commercially-available product,” said Matt Jonkman, OISF chairman. “We felt there was a tremendous need for a fully open source version of an IDP system, so we built Suricata from scratch and will maintain it under the non-profit foundation. This will guarantee that it will remain available to those who wish to use it or contribute to the program either privately or commercially.”