Dropping Privileges After Startup

Currently, libcap-ng is needed for dropping privileges on Suricata after startup. For libcap, see status of feature request number #276 -- Libcap support for dropping privileges.

Most distributions have libcap-ng in their repositories.

To download the current version of libcap-ng from upstream, see also http://people.redhat.com/sgrubb/libcap-ng/ChangeLog

::

wget http://people.redhat.com/sgrubb/libcap-ng/libcap-ng-0.7.8.tar.gz tar -xzvf libcap-ng-0.7.8.tar.gz cd libcap-ng-0.7.8 ./configure make make install

Download, configure, compile and install Suricata for your particular setup. See :doc:../install. Depending on your environment, you may need to add the --with-libpcap_ng-libraries and --with-libpcap_ng-includes options during the configure step. e.g:

::

./configure --with-libcap_ng-libraries=/usr/local/lib
--with-libcap_ng-includes=/usr/local/include

Now, when you run Suricata, tell it what user and/or group you want it to run as after startup with the --user and --group options. e.g. (this assumes a 'suri' user and group):

::

suricata -D -i eth0 --user=suri --group=suri

You will also want to make sure your user/group permissions are set so Suricata can still write to its log files which are usually located in /var/log/suricata.

::

mkdir -p /var/log/suricata chown -R root:suri /var/log/suricata chmod -R 775 /var/log/suricata