Wikipedia
OSSIM (Open Source Security Information Management) is an open source security information and event management system, integrating a selection of tools designed to aid network administrators in computer security, intrusion detection and prevention.
The project began in 2003 as a collaboration between Dominique Karg and Julio Casal. In 2008 it became the basis for their company AlienVault. Following the acquisition of the Eureka project label and completion of R&D, AlienVault began selling a commercial derivative of OSSIM ('AlienVault Unified Security Management').
OSSIM has had four major-version releases since its creation and is on a 5.x.x version numbering. An Information visualization of the contributions to the source code for OSSIM is published at 8 years of OSSIM. The project has approximately 7.4 million lines of code.
Version
Release date
1.04
23 February 2008
2.1
10 July 2009
3.0
16 September 2011
4.0
July 17, 2012
5.0
April 20, 2015
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 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.
The software is distributed freely under the GNU General Public License. Unlike the individual components which may be installed onto an existing system, OSSIM is distributed as an installable ISO image designed to deployed to a physical or virtual host as the core operating system of the host. OSSIM is built using Debian GNU/Linux distribution as its underlying operating system.