Cowrie vs Suricata
GitHub Stats
About Cowrie
Cowrie is a medium to high interaction SSH and Telnet honeypot designed to log brute force attacks, shell interactions, and file downloads. It emulates a full Unix system with a fake filesystem, allowing attackers to interact naturally while all commands, keystrokes, and uploaded files are recorded. Cowrie supports SFTP/SCP file upload capture, session replay in real-time or asynchronously, and forwards connection metadata to ELK, Splunk, or JSON files. It can proxy connections to real systems for high-interaction scenarios. Used to collect threat intelligence on attack tools, credentials, and TTPs being used against SSH infrastructure.
About Suricata
Suricata is a high-performance Network IDS, IPS, and Network Security Monitoring engine developed by the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF). It inspects network traffic using rules (compatible with Snort rules) and protocol analysis to detect threats including intrusion attempts, malware communication, policy violations, and data exfiltration. Suricata's multi-threaded architecture takes full advantage of modern multi-core hardware, achieving inspection speeds that single-threaded alternatives cannot match. Beyond IDS/IPS alerting, Suricata provides comprehensive protocol logging (HTTP, DNS, TLS, SMB, and more), file extraction from network traffic, and Lua scripting for custom detection logic. It supports AF_PACKET, PF_RING, and DPDK for high-speed packet acquisition, and outputs structured JSON logs (EVE format) that integrate cleanly with Elasticsearch, Splunk, and other SIEM platforms.
Platform Support
Tags
Cowrie only
Suricata only