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<html>
<head>
<title>
SEC - open source and platform independent event correlation tool
</title>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION"
CONTENT="SEC - open source and platform independent event correlation tool">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="sec, simple event correlator,
simple event correlation tool, platform independent event correlation tool,
open source event correlation tool, event processing, event analysis,
log correlation, log management, log monitoring, log analysis,
security management, security monitoring, network management,
network monitoring, fraud detection">
</head>
<body>
<h1>SEC - simple event correlator</h1>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
SEC is an event correlation tool for advanced event processing which can be
harnessed for event log monitoring, for network and security management, for
fraud detection, and for any other task which involves event correlation.
Event correlation is a procedure where a stream of events is processed,
in order to detect (and act on) certain event groups that occur within
predefined time windows.
<p>
Many traditional event log management systems store events in a database and
execute database queries for implementing event correlation. However, such
systems are heavyweight solutions and often involve a complex database
infrastructure on dedicated hardware.
<p>
In contrast, SEC is a lightweight and platform-independent event correlator
which runs as a single process. The user can start it as a daemon, employ it
in shell pipelines, execute it interactively in a terminal, run many SEC
processes simultaneously for different tasks, and use it in a wide variety of
other ways.
<p>
SEC reads lines from files, named pipes, or standard input,
matches the lines with patterns (like regular expressions or Perl subroutines)
for recognizing input events, and correlates events according to the rules in
its configuration file(s). SEC can produce output by executing external
programs (e.g., <i>snmptrap</i> or <i>mail</i>), by writing to files,
by sending data to TCP and UDP based servers, by calling precompiled Perl
subroutines, etc.
<h3>Documentation</h3>
If you are new to SEC,
<a href="SEC-tutorial.pdf">"Simple Event Correlator Tutorial"</a>
provides a gentle introduction to SEC.
Rule examples from the tutorial are also available in
<a href="https://github.com/simple-evcorr/tutorial">tutorial repository</a>.
<p>
See <a href="man.html">SEC manpage</a> for official documentation.
The manpage provides an in-depth discussion of all SEC features and
presents a number of detailed rule examples.
<p>
Also, the <a href="FAQ.html">SEC FAQ</a> provides answers to some frequently
asked questions.
<h3>Other reading</h3>
For additional information, you can check the following sources:
<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://ristov.github.io/publications/cogsima15-sec-web.pdf">
"Simple Event Correlator - Best Practices for Creating Scalable
Configurations"</a> - a paper presented at IEEE CogSIMA 2015 which describes
some techniques for creating scalable configurations.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/09_lang-online.pdf">
"Using SEC"</a> by David Lang -
a paper from USENIX ;login: Magazine December 2013 issue.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/simple-evcorr/rulesets/">
SEC rule repository</a> - sample SEC rulesets contributed by users.</li>
</ul>
<p>
Here you can find the list of papers from more distant past that are relevant
for SEC-2.6 or older (some solutions from these papers can be implemented
more efficiently with more recent SEC versions):
<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://ristov.github.io/publications/sec-issa2012.pdf">
"Security Event Processing with Simple Event Correlator"</a> -
a paper from ISSA Journal August 2012 issue which focuses on some security
event processing scenarios.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://ristov.github.io/publications/sec-hakin9-2006.pdf">
"Simple Event Correlator for real-time security log monitoring"</a> -
a paper from Hakin9 Magazine 1/2006 (6).</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa04/tech/full_papers/rouillard/rouillard.pdf">
"Real-time log file analysis using the Simple Event Correlator (SEC)"</a>
by John P. Rouillard - a paper with SEC ruleset examples that was presented
at USENIX LISA 2004.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://ristov.github.io/publications/sec-ipom02-web.pdf">
"SEC - a Lightweight Event Correlation Tool"</a> - an early paper about SEC
that was presented at IEEE IPOM 2002.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Installation information and dependencies</h3>
SEC has been primarily tested on Linux and Solaris, but since it is written
in Perl and does not use any platform-dependent code, it should work on any
modern UNIX platform. SEC is also known to work on Windows, although some
of the functionality that is native to UNIX will be disabled.
<p>
In order to install SEC, check where your Perl executable is located
and change the first line in the <i>sec</i> file accordingly.
For example, if your Perl executable is <i>/usr/local/bin/perl</i>,
set the first line to <i>#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w</i>.
Then copy <i>sec</i> and <i>sec.man</i> (SEC manpage)
to appropriate directories, e.g., <br>
<i>cp sec /usr/local/bin</i> <br>
<i>cp sec.man /usr/local/man/man1/sec.1</i>
<p>
Since SEC is not tested against ancient Perl releases,
it is recommended to run SEC with at least Perl 5.8 (see
<a href="https://www.perl.org">https://www.perl.org</a> for the latest stable
Perl release).
Apart from Perl, SEC does not depend on other software.
It uses Perl <i>Getopt</i>, <i>POSIX</i>, <i>Fcntl</i>, <i>Socket</i>,
<i>IO::Handle</i>, <i>Sys::Syslog</i>, and <i>JSON::PP</i> modules
which are included in the standard installation of Perl (the presence of
<i>Sys::Syslog</i> and <i>JSON::PP</i> is optional).
<a name="mailinglist">
<h3>Mailing list</h3>
There is a
<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/simple-evcorr/mailman/">
mailing list for SEC users</a>.
The purpose of this list is to facilitate discussion between SEC users,
so that you can ask questions from more experienced users and share your
experience with others.
Before posting a question, please
<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/simple-evcorr/mailman/search/?mail_list=simple-evcorr-users">
search</a>
the list - there are some questions that get asked quite frequently and
you might find several answers in the
<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/simple-evcorr/mailman/simple-evcorr-users/">
mailing list archive</a>.
<a name="download">
<h3>Download</h3>
<a href="https://github.com/simple-evcorr/sec/releases/download/2.9.4/sec-2.9.4.tar.gz">
sec-2.9.4.tar.gz</a> <i>(February 12 2026)</i>
<p>
... or you can visit SEC download pages at
<a href="https://github.com/simple-evcorr/sec/releases">GitHub</a> or
<a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/simple-evcorr/files/">Sourceforge</a>
(have also older versions available).
<p>
SEC has also been packaged for a number of Linux and BSD distributions.
You can try the following links for finding a package for your platform: <br>
- <a href="https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=3817">
Fedora and RHEL packages at Koji</a> <br>
- <a href="https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=sec">
RPM package search at rpmfind.net</a> <br>
- <a href="https://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/sec">Debian package info</a> <br>
- <a href="https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=names&exact=1&keywords=sec">
Ubuntu package info</a> <br>
- <a href="https://software.opensuse.org/package/sec">
SLE and openSUSE package info</a> <br>
- <a href="https://packages.gentoo.org/package/net-analyzer/sec">
Gentoo package info</a> <br>
- <a href="https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sec/">
Arch Linux package info</a> <br>
- <a href="https://openports.pl/path/sysutils/sec">OpenBSD package info</a> <br>
- <a href="https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/sec">FreeBSD package info</a> <br>
(if any of the links are broken, please contact the author).
<h3>Author</h3>
<address>
<a href="https://ristov.github.io">Risto Vaarandi</a>
(firstname d0t lastname at gmail d0t c0m)
</address>
<p>
Please don't contact the author with SEC usage questions - you should post
such questions to the SEC mailing list.
<h3>Academic attribution</h3>
When you publish research results that have involved the use of SEC,
please provide a reference to the following paper in your publication:
<p>
Risto Vaarandi, Bernhards Blumbergs and Emin Caliskan,
"Simple Event Correlator - Best Practices for Creating Scalable Configurations,"
Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE CogSIMA Conference, pp. 96-100, 2015
<h3>Acknowledgments</h3>
The author is grateful to <a href="https://taltech.ee">TalTech</a>
and <a href="https://www.seb.ee">SEB Estonia</a>
for supporting this work.
<p>
The author also thanks the following people for supplying software patches,
documentation fixes, and suggesting new features:
Al Sorrell, Brian Mielke, David Lang, James Brown, Jon Frazier, Mark D. Nagel,
Peter Eckel, Rick Casey, and William Gertz.
<p>
Last but not least, the author expresses his profound gratitude to
John P. Rouillard for many great ideas and creative discussions that have
helped to develop SEC.
</body>
</html>