Falco vs. AuditD from the HIDS perspective

The blog post delves into a comparative analysis of two Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) tools, Falco and AuditD, highlighting their functionalities, installation processes, rule creation, and event output. Falco, developed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is tailored for runtime threat detection in cloud-native environments such as containers and Kubernetes, offering a rich set of pre-configured rules and supports more than 150 filters. AuditD, on the other hand, is a native Linux feature that monitors system activities for incident investigation, with around 40 filters mainly focused on host-level detections. Both tools rely on system calls (syscalls) for detecting intrusions, but they differ significantly in rule creation and event output, with Falco offering more customizable and granular rule definitions and easier event forwarding through tools like Falco Sidekick. While both tools demonstrate decent resource consumption under stress tests, Falco appears more versatile, especially in cloud-native contexts, whereas AuditD offers more detailed object information but requires additional decoding for certain data fields. The choice between these tools should consider team expertise and long-term security strategy.