Comment 2 for bug 872582

Thanks for responding to this bug. I would classify this as medium instead of wishlist, though. The inability to run current rules severely impacts this non-core application, the sole function of Snort is to check traffic against an up-to-date list of signatures that correspond to malicious traffic and that functionality is crippled by the inability of this version to operate with current sigs.

There is also a security impact to this bug because Snort is an application that users expect to provide security protection, similar to anti-virus. As a network-based security application, it may be used to provide protection to many systems at once (I operate Snort sensors that protect tens of thousands of client-systems by inspecting traffic at the border of my network). Like anti-virus sigs that are a year or more old, the sigs that this version of Snort is capable of running provide much less protection than current versions and probably less protection than users believe they are getting.