This time I am exploring the use of a Raspberry Pi as an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and/or security monitoring/tracking system for your LAN.

Travis F Smith who wrote here, http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/sweet-security-part-2-creating-a-defensible-raspberry-pi/ says in part 1 of his postings on his blog that the Raspberry Pi 2 B is http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/cyber-security/sweet-security-deploying-a-defensive-raspberry-pi/  from the article:

As a proof-of-concept, I built a Raspberry 2 Model B running Bro, Critica-Stack, Losgstash, Elastic Search and Kibana and placed it in-line on my own home network between the router and the rest of my internal network. This setup has been running for more than a month without any issues, using less than half of the available CPU and memory resources on the Raspberry Pi.

My older Raspberry Pi 1 may work just as well. More to come…

Source code for Travis’s project:  https://github.com/TravisFSmith/SweetSecurity

The “Bro” IDS open source project:  https://www.bro.org/

So you want to roll out a Linux installation on AWS for example. There’s one here. on Amazon’s site and I have included a short exerpt from their web page below:

Let’s get started with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) by launching, connecting to, and using a Linux instance. An instance is a virtual server in the AWS cloud. With Amazon EC2, you can set up and configure the operating system and applications that run on your instance.

When you sign up for AWS, you can get started with Amazon EC2 for free using the AWS Free Tier. If you created your AWS account less than 12 months ago, and have not already exceeded the free tier benefits for Amazon EC2, it will not cost you anything to complete this tutorial, because we help you select options that are within the free tier benefits. Otherwise, you’ll incur the standard Amazon EC2 usage fees from the time that you launch the instance until you terminate the instance (which is the final task of this tutorial), even if it remains idle.

So after you give their documentation and walk-thru a go.