OSSIM is a popular Open Source SIEM or Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) product, providing event collection, normalization and correlation.
OSSIM stands for Open Source Security Information Management, it was launched in 2003 by security engineers because of the lack of available open source products, OSSIM was created specifically to address the reality many security professionals face: A SIEM, whether it is open source or commercial, is virtually useless without the basic security controls necessary for security visibility.
What is OSSIM Security Information and Event Management System
As a SIEM system, OSSIM is intended to give security analysts and administrators a view of all the security-related aspects of their system, by combining log management and asset management and discovery with information from dedicated information security controls and detection systems. This information is then correlated together to create contexts to the information not visible from one piece alone.
OSSIM performs these functions using other well-known[8] open-source software security components, unifying them under a single browser-based user interface. The interface provides graphical analysis tools for information collected from the underlying open source software component (many of which are command line only tools that otherwise log only to a plain text file) and allows centralized management of configuration options.
It performs:
- Asset discovery
- Vulnerability assessment
- Intrusion detection
- Behavioral monitoring
- SIEM
OSSIM Open Source SIEM Components
OSSIM features the following software components:
- PRADS, used to identify hosts and services by passively monitoring network traffic. Added in release v4.0.[9]
- OpenVAS, used for vulnerability assessment and for cross correlation of (Intrusion detection system (IDS) alerts vs Vulnerability Scanner) information.
- Snort, used as an Intrusion detection system (IDS), and also used for cross correlation with Nessus.
- Suricata, used as an Intrusion detection system (IDS), as of version 4.2 this is the IDS used in the default configuration
- Tcptrack, used for session data information which can grant useful information for attack correlation.
- Nagios, used to monitor host and service availability information based on a host asset database.
- OSSEC, a Host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS).
- Munin, for traffic analysis and service watchdogging.
- NFSen/NFDump, used to collect and analyze NetFlow information.
- FProbe, used to generate NetFlow data from captured traffic.
- OSSIM also includes self developed tools, the most important being a generic correlation engine with logical directive support and logs integration with plugins.
Note: Suricata and Snort cannot be used at the same time. Snort is currently being phased out in favour of Suricata
You can download OSSIM here:
Or read more here.