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.