A few months ago, with ntopng 3.8, we introduced support for continuous traffic recording, that allows you to drill down historical data from the timeseries level up to raw packets. This is useful when troubleshooting a network issue or analysing a security event, by combining traffic visibility with raw traffic analysis. In order to record raw […]
Building a (Cheap) Continuous Packet Recorder using n2disk and PF_RING [Part 2]
Continuous packet recorders are devices that capture raw traffic to disk, providing a window into network history, that allows you to go back in time when a network event occurs, and analyse traffic up to the packet level to find the exact network activity that caused the problem. n2disk is a software application part of […]
Introducing PF_RING Configuration Wizard
Getting started with PF_RING can be a bit tricky as it requires the creation of a few configuration files in order to setup the service, especially when ZC drivers need to be used. First of all it requires packages installation: PF_RING comes with a set of packages for installing the userspace libraries (pfring), the kernel […]
Introducing n2disk 3.2: towards 100 Gbit to disk
This is to announce a new n2disk release 3.2. This release, besides addressing a few issues, includes new juicy features: Multithreaded dump and support for multiple volumes. This is useful in a few cases: If you want to record traffic above 30-40 Gbit/s to HDDs or SSDs, you should pay attention to the RAID controller […]
Introducing PF_RING 7.4: PF_RING FT, Containers and Virtual Functions Support
This is to announce a new PF_RING major release 7.4. This release includes many improvements to the PF_RING FT library, which is now more mature thanks to new API functionalities and features that provide more flexibility. This release also addresses many issues, and moves a step forward in the same direction of release 7.2, which included […]
How to accelerate Bro with PF_RING FT
We discussed many times about the large quantity of work IDSs have to carry on, and the high CPU load they require, this is the case of Suricata due to the thousands of rules that need to be evaluated for every single packet, but this is also the case of the Bro Network Security Monitor. […]
Introducing PF_RING 7.2, including PF_RING FT and nBroker
This is to announce a new PF_RING major release 7.2 that includes: Support for Ubuntu 18 as well the latest Debian and CentOS kernels. Many improvements to the FPGA capture modules and the ZC library (that is now able to reserve head room for zero-copy traffic encapsulation/decapsulation, just to mention one). Full support for Containers […]
How to accelerate Suricata, Bro, Snort with PF_RING FT
In a previous post we discussed the advantages of using specialized adapters featuring flow offload in hardware for accelerating IDS applications. What we have learnt is that IDSs are typically CPU-bound applications, and this is mainly caused by the thousands of rules that need to be evaluated for every single packet (of course in addition to packet capture). […]
Introducing nBroker: Traffic Steering and Filtering on Intel RRC (FM10K)
Exactly two years ago we introduced Intel FM10K (FM10000) support in PF_RING ZC. The Intel FM10K ethernet controller family supports 10/25/40/100 Gbit on the same NIC, at a convenient price (sub 1000$ range) and it powers NIC various models manufactured by Silicom Inc. The most interesting aspect of the FM10K is the programmability that this adapter provides. […]
Introducing PF_RING FT: nDPI-based Flow Classification and Filtering for PF_RING and DPDK
Motivation Most network monitoring and security applications are based on flow processing, which is in practice the activity of grouping packets based on common attributes (e.g. source and destination IP, source and destination port, protocol, etc.) and do some analysis based on the collected information. What happens behind the scenes can be divided in a few major […]