Author: Alfredo Cardigliano

ntop

What’s In The (Alert) Inbox?

ntopng emits alerts in order to report relevant. They can be triggered by traffic thresholds, user scripts, behavioural checks, or due to Security issues, including those detected by IDS systems integrated with ntopng (the full list of built-in checks, and related alerts, that can be enabled in ntopng is available in the Alerts section of the documentation). Sometimes they are really critical and should be handled immediately to fix the problem, this is the case of Security events for instance (e.g. a compromised host that must be sanitized as soon as …
nEdge

Deploying nEdge with Multiple (Virtual) LANs (and WANs)

Exactly 3 years elapsed from the introduction of nEdge (ntopng Edge), and despite the fact we haven’t posted much about it in our blog, this tool continued to grow, many features have been added over time, and we see that every time new users have the chance to try it, they are amazed about the capabilities it provides. If it’s the first time you hear about nEdge, we suggest to read the introductory post which explains how nEdge enables Network administrators to enforce policies at Layer-7 on network users, the nEdge product page which is providing …
cento

Enabling Zeek and Suricata On-Demand at 40/100 Gbit using PF_RING

Overview Those of you who have some experience with IDS or IPS systems, like Zeek and Suricata, are probably aware of how CPU intensive and memory consuming those applications are due to the nature of the activities they carry on (e.g. signatures matching). This leads to high system load and packet loss when the packet rate becomes high (10+ Gbi+) making these IDSs unlikely to be to deployed on high-speed networks. As nProbe Cento can analyse networks up to 100 Gbit while using nDPI for ETA (Encrypted Traffic Analysis), ntopng …
ntop

How to Enable Smart Recording in ntopng (and n2disk)

Recently, we have introduced Smart Recording in n2disk to combine Cybersecurity with Packet-to-Disk. In this previous post (and in the documentation) we described the idea behind it and described how to enable it in a few simple steps.  For those of you who prefer a video resource, and want to learn more about the technology and how to get the most out of it,  here’s the step-by-step video tutorial. Enjoy!       …
Announce

Introducing Smart Recording in n2disk: Combining Cybersecurity with Packet-to-Disk

In short Continuous network traffic recorders are applications (or appliances) that write network traffic on disk. In case of issues (e.g. security breach or network outage) they enable network and security analysts to go back in time and see how a problem originated. The main limitation of this practice is that a lot of data it is written to disk even when there is nothing special happening on the network. Similar to the evolution of surveillance cameras that implemented “motion detection” to trigger recording when some meaningful even happen, this …
ntop

Hardware Traffic Duplication on Intel Adapters Using PF_RING

Those of you who are familiar with kernel-bypass drivers like PF_RING ZC know that it is not possible to run multiple applications on top of the same Network interface and capture the same traffic twice. This is the case of Intel and most FPGA adapters. In fact, since the application takes full control of the adapter and configures it to copy packets directly to the application’s memory in hardware, access to the device must be exclusive. This unless the adapter natively support multiple consumers: this is the case of Mellanox/NVIDIA  and …
ntop

The Brand New nBox UI is Out

As announced during the last ntop Webinar, the new nBox UI has been released! What is nBox UI? nBox UI is a web-based User Interface that simplifies the ntop’s software configurations (ntopng, nProbe, nProbe Cento, n2disk, …), assisting with complex things such as creating configuration files and managing the services and let you focus on playing with the applications. nBox UI also helps you manage the box, with the ability to configure the box connectivity, users, etc. nBox UI is in practice what we use to build our nBox Recorder …
ntop

Introducing PF_RING 8.4: Zero-Copy Promisc Capture on Virtual Functions

This is to announce a new PF_RING release 8.4 ! This stable release adds zero-copy support for a new range of (virtual) adapters from Intel: the iavf-zc driver can be used to capture traffic from i40e (X710/XL710) and ice (E810) Virtual Functions. This new driver paves the way for new packet capture architectures as it enables high-speed promiscuous capture on Virtual Functions by leveraging on the SR-IOV trust mode available on Intel X710/XL710 adapters. It is now possible for instance to capture all traffic hitting the physical interface from multiple …
ntop

ntop Professional Training: November 2022

ntop tools are continuously evolving and getting extended in order to take into account new requirements. Every new release adds many new features that needs to be mastered. In addition to this, new users demand professional training to quickly learn our tools and be productive in limited time. For this reason ntop offers professional training in addition to periodic webinars, video tutorials, and community support. This is to announce that the next ntop Professional Training will take place in November 2022. This ntop training mainly focus on ntopng, new features, …
PF_RING

Introducing PF_RING 8.2: New Mellanox Support

This is to announce a new PF_RING release 8.2! This new stable version adds support for a new family of ASIC-based adapters from Mellanox/NVIDIA, including ConnectX-5 and ConnectX-6 (please check the User’s Guide for the exact list of supported firmwares). This new driver/adapter combination delivers high performance (in our tests nProbe Cento was able to scale up to 100 Gbps with worst case traffic using a few CPU cores) and provides high flexibility, with support for hardware packet filtering, traffic duplication, load-balancing and nanosecond hardware timestamping as described in a previous post. This …
ntop

ntop Professional Training: May 2022

This is to announce that the next ntop professional training will take place in May 2022. All those who are using ntop tools for business are invited to attend this session. The idea is to divide the training in 5 session of 90 minutes each, so that you can attend the training without having to leave your daily activities. At this page can read more about training content, costs, and registration information Make sure to join it ! …
ntop

Introducing PF_RING ZC Support for Mellanox Adapters

PF_RING ZC is ntop’s high-speed zero-copy technology for high speed packet capture and processing. Until now ZC supported 10/40/100 Gbit adapters from Intel based on ASIC chips, in addition to the FPGA-based 100 Gbit adapters already supported by PF_RING including Accolade/Napatech/Silicom. This post is to announce a new ZC driver, known as mlx, supporting a new family of 100 Gbit ASIC-based adapters, this time from Mellanox/NVIDIA, including ConnectX-5 and ConnectX-6 adapters. The supported ConnectX adapters from Mellanox, in combination with the new mlx driver, demonstrated to be capable of high performance, by …