Project

General

Profile

Actions

Feature #6290

closed

support case insensitive testing of HTTP header name existence

Added by Brandon Murphy 8 months ago. Updated 4 months ago.

Status:
Closed
Priority:
Normal
Target version:
Effort:
Difficulty:
Label:

Description

Consider the initial opening comment on https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/issues/5774.

Many rules are written with content negations on HTTP header names such as:

http.header_names; content:!"Accept-"; content:!"Referer|0d 0a|";

However, due to HTTP/2 being lowercase header names these content negations fail to provide the desired effect, as they are case sensitive matches.

Yes, we can add nocase to all of these rules, though as discussed within https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/issues/5774, I'm not sure if that is the best option.

One option I did find when looking into supporting Snort 3 is the http_header_test keyword - https://docs.snort.org/rules/options/payload/http/header_test

# check that the User-Agent field is absent
http_header_test:field user-agent,absent;

as per Snort 3's http_header docs, the header name is case insensitive

Snort 3 also allows users the ability to look for content matches in specific HTTP header fields with the optional field header_name argument. This option is specified with a colon character after http_header, followed by the word "field", and lastly followed by the specific header field name (which is case-insensitive).

This request is to introduce a similar capability within Suricata.

Alternatives considered:
1. http.header_names provides logic to perform the same check while adding the nocase statement to each content. There are currently 10,000+ rules within the ETPRO ruleset that use the http.header_names keyword, some of which have multiple content matches/negations against that buffer that would all need updated. Making such a large number of modifications to existing rules is disruptive to our customer base.

Related Issues:
https://redmine.openinfosecfoundation.org/issues/5775 - This feature request stems from a "random thought" I had when talking through.


Subtasks 1 (0 open1 closed)

Feature #6613: support case insensitive testing of HTTP header name existence (7.0.x backport)ClosedPhilippe AntoineActions

Related issues 2 (2 open0 closed)

Related to Suricata - Task #6443: Suricon 2023 brainstormAssignedVictor JulienActions
Related to Suricata - Support #5774: Addressing Mixed Case in HTTP Headers Names and HTTP2NewOISF DevActions
Actions

Also available in: Atom PDF