Most ntop applications (ntopng, nProbe, Cento) and libraries (FT) are based on the concept of flow processing, that merely means keeping track of all network communications. In order to implement this, network packets are decoded and, based on a “key” (usually a 5-tuple consisting of protocol and src/dst IP and port), clustered into flows (other […]
Monitoring Industrial IoT/Scada Traffic with nDPI and ntopng
Monitoring Industrial IoT and SCADA traffic can be challenging as most open source monitoring tools are designed for Internet protocols. As this is becoming a hot topic with companies automating production lines, we have decided to enhance ntop tools to provide our user community traffic visibility even in industrial environments. This has required to enhance […]
How to Detect Domain Hiding (a.k.a. as Domain Fronting)
Domain fronting is a technique that was used in 2010s by mobile apps to attempt to bypass censorship. The technique relies on a “front” legitimate domain that basically acts as a pivot for the forbidden domain. In essence an attacker performs a HTTPS connection where in the DNS (used to resolve the domain name) and […]
Introducing n2n 2.8: Modern Crypto and Data Compression
This is to announce the release of n2n 2.8 stable. This release brings significant new features to n2n’s crypto world and offers some compression opportunities. Overall n2n performance has been greatly enhanced, reduced bandwidth usage thanks to data compression, and as state of the art security with new crypto options. The added support for routing […]
Mice and Elephants: HowTo Detect and Monitor Periodic Traffic
Most people are used to top X: top senders, top receivers, top protocols. So in essence they are looking for elephants. While this is a good practice, mice are also very interesting as they can often be hidden in the noise. In cybersecurity noise is very good for attackers as they often try to hide […]
July 16th and 24th: Community Meeting and Webinar Announcement
This month we’ll meet our community in two different events: When: Thursday, July 16th, 16:00 CET / 10 AM EST What: Live community meeting Where: Discord. You can read more here how to join on the public ntop voice channel for this live event. Abstract: Recently we have started to use discord as platform for interacting […]
Introducing nDPI Risk Analysis for (Cybersecurity) Network Traffic Analysis (was Ripple20)
Earlier last month Ripple20 became popular as it has listed some vulnerabilities found in a custom IP stack used by many IoT devices. Despite the hype on Ripple20, in essence the tool used to fingerprint vulnerable devices sends either malformed or valid (with some values in the allowed range albeit with values deprecated or obsolete) […]
Howto Identify and Block Telegram-based Botnets
Botnets are a popular way to run malware on a network using the command and control paradigm. Popular protocols used by botnets include IRC and HTTP. Most IDSs can detect bots as long as they can inspect the network traffic. This makes networks administrators blind when bots move to encrypted and cloud-based (i.e. that you […]
ntop Tools Taxonomy
As sometime people is confused about the various options ntopng tools offer, this post is an attempt to clarify them in a single page. Enjoy!
Why Traffic Behaviour Analysis is Good (was Encrypting TLS 1.3 Traffic)
In the latest nDPI meetup, we have discussed future directions, including extending the current encrypted traffic analysis features. Currently nDPI supports both fingerprint and behaviour encrypted traffic analysis techniques to provide TLS traffic visibility. At ntop we have never liked too much fingerprinting techniques such as JA3 that are used by many popular IDSs and […]