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Author: Alfredo Cardigliano

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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 …
ntop

Introducing PF_RING 8.0: Batch Packet Processing and XDP Support
This is to announce a new PF_RING release 8.0. This new stable version includes enhancements for improving application performances, by adding support for batch processing also in the standard API (it was already available in the ZC API), and consolidates XDP support, which has been reworked to fully leverage on the latest Zero-Copy support and buffers management and take full advantage of the native batch capture. This release also adds support for the latest kernels to the ZC drivers for Intel adapters, including those shipped with CentOS (8.4) and Ubuntu LTS (20) …
cento

Introducing nProbe Cento 1.14
This is to announce a new release of the ntop’s 100 Gbit probe, nProbe Cento 1.14. In this version we have integrated the latest features from nDPI, the ntop’s Deep-Packet-Inspection engine, that is now 2.5x faster than the previous version. Flows are enriched with Flow Risks, which represents a set of issues detected by nDPI, and a Flow Score, which is computed based on the risks severity, to indicates how bad is each flow. The flow dump has also been improved by adding the Community ID (a flow identifier which …
nScrub

A Step-By-Step Guide for Protecting Your Network with nScrub
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks represent a family cyber-attacks that are more and more common nowadays. They aim to make the service unavailable by overwhelming the victim with high traffic volumes (this is the case of volumetric or amplification attacks based on UDP, ICMP, DNS, …) or an high number of requests (including TCP connection attacks like the SYB flood, or Layer 7 attacks able to exhaust the resources of the service at the application level). This differentiate them from other cyber-attacks like intrusion attacks or malwares aiming to destroying, stealing …
n2disk

Exploiting Arista MetaWatch with n2disk and ntopng: HighRes Timestamping and Analytics
Precise packet timestamping is a key feature for network traffic analysis and troubleshooting. Traditionally many people use FPGA-based NICs with precise timestamping (e.g. Napatech, Silicom) even though a good precision can be obtained with PTP-based NICs such as many Intel network adapters. A better alternative to this practice is to avoid ad all using specialised adapters and rely on existing network devices to timestamp packets. Arista packet brokers with MetaWatch  can be configured to add an extra trailer (Metamako) with metadata to every captured packet. In fact Arista 7150 Series …

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