nDPI

Introducing nDPI 4.0: DPI for CyberSecurity and Traffic Analysis

This is to announce nDPI 4.0. With this new stable release we have extended the scope of nDPI that was originally conceived as a toolkit for detecting application protocols. nDPI is now a modern library for packet processing that in addition to DPI it includes self-contained, efficient (both in memory and processing speed) streaming versions of popular algorithms for data analysis including: Data Forecasting and Anomaly Detection Single, Double, Triple (Holt-Winters) Exponential Smoothing RSI (Relative Strength Index) Data Binning, Clustering, and Similarity Evaluation Network Data Analysis Jitter Entropy GeoIP Data …
nProbe

Collecting Flows from Hundred of Routers Using Observation Points

Collecting flows on large networks with hundred of routers can be challenging. Beside the number of flows to be collected, another key point is to be able to visualize the informations in a simple yet effective way. ntopng allows you to create up to 32 virtual flow collection interfaces that can be used to avoid merging collected flows: unfortunately they are not enough when collecting flows from 100+ routers. In the latest ntopng and nProbe dev versions (soon to become stable), we have implemented the concept of observation point, that …
nProbe

NetFlow/IPFIX At Scale: Comparing nProbe/ClickHouse vs nProbe/ntopng

In our previous post we have analysed the performance of the pipeline nProbe+ntopng for those who need to collect flows and analyse them, trigger alerts, create timeseries, provide a realtime monitoring console, dump them to nIndex and inform remote recipients in case of some problem is detected. This is the main difference between the ntop solution and a NetFlow collector whose main goal is to dump flows on a database with any or little flow analysis. In essence the current state of the art with 4 nProbe instances sending data …
nProbe

NetFlow Collection Performance Using ntopng and nProbe

Introduction ntopng, in combination with nProbe, can be used to collect NetFlow. Their use for NetFlow collection is described in detail here. In this post we measure the performance of nProbe and ntopng when used together to collect, analyze, and dump NetFlow data. The idea is to provide performance figures useful to understand the maximum rate at which NetFlow can be processed without loss of data. Before giving the actual figures, it is worth discussing briefly the most relevant unit of measure that will be used, i.e., the number of …
nProbe

How to Collect and Analyse AWS VPC Flow Logs

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs and in essence text-based Netflow-like logs consisting of fields that describe the traffic flow. They are often collected on disk and published to S3 buckets or CloudWatch for an AWS-centric monitoring infrastructure (extra AWS charge is necessary). Now suppose that you want to use this information to monitor your VPC using ntop tools or turn these logs in industry standard NetFlow/IPFIX flows that can be ingested in any monitoring application unable to understand this proprietary log format. In this case you can use …
nProbe

Handling Traffic Directions with sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX

Network interfaces natively support RX and TX directions, so tools such as ntopng can detect the traffic directions and depict this information accordingly. In the above picture that ntopng shows in the top menubar, TX traffic is depicted in blue and RX in green. All simple. Now suppose you need to analyse sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX flows, and be interested to understand how much traffic leaves/enters your network. Example suppose you generate IPFIX flows on your Internet gateway: how much of this traffic is sent to the Internet and how much is received? …
nProbe

nProbe IPS: How To setup an Inline Layer-7 Traffic Policer in 5 Minutes

Introduction Recently, we have added Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) capabilities to our nProbe. Those capabilities are available starting from the latest 9.5 version, both for Linux and FreeBSD – including OPNsense and pfSense, and are available with all nProbe versions and licenses (see the product page for additional details). On Linux, nProbe leverages the netfilter framework. In essence, the kernel send packets to nProbe via NF_QUEUE which, in turn, gives each packet a pass/drop verdict so that it can be dropped or let it continue its journey through the network. …
Cybersecurity

How to Spot Unsafe Communications using nDPI Flow Risk Score

nDPI it is much more than a DPI library used to detect the application protocol. In the past year, nDPI has grown in terms of cybersecurity features used to detect threats and network issues leveraging on the concept of flow risk. Each nDPI-analysed flow has associated a numerical flow risk that in essence is a bitmap with a bit set to 1 whenever a risk has been detected for such flow. The list of (to date) supported flow risks are: HTTP suspicious user-agent HTTP numeric IP host contacted HTTP suspicious …
Cybersecurity

On Network Visibility and Cybersecurity

Today we had the change to talk about network visibility and cybersecurity during an event organised by the Milan Internet Exchange MIX-IT. In this talk we have presented the current state of development in this area at ntop and provided an outlook of some of the features that we’re developing and that will be released later this summer. These are the presentation slides for those who didn’t have the change to attend the event. Enjoy ! …
Announce

May 27th: Webinar on DPI-based traffic enforcement, ntop tools on pfSense/OPNsense

For a long time, ntop mainly focused on passive traffic analysis. As cybersecurity is becoming a main concern for many organisation and individuals, we have boosted our tools by introducing facilities for spotting threats and blocking unsafe traffic. This month we will organise a webinar that will cover two main topics: How to use the nProbe IPS mode to block traffic based on nDPI and other traffic policies. Tutorial on using ntopng and nProbe on pfSense/OPNsense. This event took place on Thursday May 27th at 4PM CET / 10AM EST. …
nProbe

Introducing nProbe IPS: 10 Gbit nDPI-based Traffic Policer and Shaper

This is to introduce a new nProbe feature that brings IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) support via nDPI for Linux and FreeBSD (including OPNsense and pfSense). As shown in the picture below, nProbe acts as a transparent bridge (with kernel offload) for applying pass/drop/shape rules to the forwarded traffic. Our goal is to combine the power of DPI and nDPI cybersecurity features to all nProbe users. When deployed on a firewall/gateway (including OPNsense/pfSense), nProbe can both monitor and apply policies to monitored traffic. Typical use case include (but are not limited …
Cybersecurity

Combining nDPI and Wireshark for Cybersecurity Traffic Analysis

At the upcoming Sharkfest Europe 2021 we’ll talk about using Wireshark in cybersecurity. Part of the talk will focus on nDPI and Wireshark integration. Since the last release nDPI features flow risk analysis, that is basically a numerical indication of potential risks associated with a network communication ranging from ‘TLS Certificate Expired’ to more complicated ‘Suspicious DGA domain name’ and ‘SQL injection’. You can find a comprehensive list of increasingly growing risks here. For the impatiens, this is a quick guide on how to play with this integration. Prerequisite Download …