News

Say Hello to ntopng 4.2: Flexible Alerting, Major Speedup, Scada, Cybersecurity

We are pleased to introduce ntopng 4.2 that introduces several new features and breakthroughs while consolidating the changes introduced with 4.0. The main goals of this release include Enhance and simplify how alerts are delivered to consumers Many internal components of ntopng have been rewritten in order to improve the overall ntopng performance, reduce system load, and capable of processing more data while reducing memory usage with respect to 4.0. Cybersecurity extensions have been greatly enhanced by leveraging on the latest nDPI enhancements that enabled the creation of several user …
nProbe

Introducing nProbe 9.2: Collection Pass-Through and Reforge, OpenWRT support, Flexible JSON-export

This is to announce the release of nProbe 9.2. The main new features of this release are focused on flow collection speed and flexibility in particular for modern JSON-based flow consumers. This is to enable applications relying on nProbe, e.g. ntopng, to scale up when collecting flows: The new –collector-passthrough option allows the flow cache to be bypassed when flows are collected. This mean that flows are forwarded to remote collectors unmodified (i.e. -T is not used) without placing them into the flow cache (i.e. flows are not merged by …
Cybersecurity

Security-Centric Traffic Analysis

Days ago we have given a short speak about cybersecurity at an Italian meetup. These are the presentation slides (English) where you can read more about the steps we have taken to make our tools more cybersecurity-oriented. Below you can also find the video that is only for Italian-speaking people (sorry about that). Enjoy!   …
cento

Introducing nProbe Cento 1.12: Combining Visibility and Cybersecurity at 100 Gbit

This is to announce the released of cento 1.12 that is a maintenance release for ntop’s 100 Gbit probe. In this version we have integrated support of the latest nDPI features to combine processing speed with latest innovations in application detection an cybersecurity. Cento’s JSON output has been greatly enhanced and it includes all the nDPI-dissected information by streaming JSON-based data to Kafka or ElasticSearch/Syslog consumers. This to make cento useful to cybersecurity analysis by combining visibility and security at 100 Gbit by streaming. Enjoy! Changelog New Features Core engine …
n2disk

Introducing n2disk 3.6: full L7 support, fast flow export, replay rate control

This is to announce a new n2disk release 3.6. This release adds full support for indexing and retrieving traffic based on the Layer-7 application protocol. This can now be enabled even when flow export is disabled, and it is possible to use the extraction tool to extract selected application traffic using the Layer-7 protocol as part of the nBPF filter. n2disk is now also able to use the main storage as a cache, and in the meantime archive pcap files moving them from the fast to a slower storage, even …
ntop

Introducing PF_RING 7.8: ZC support for new Intel adapters and much more

This is to announce a new PF_RING major release 7.8. The main changes in this release include: The new ice ZC driver supporting E800 Series 100 Gigabit Intel adapters. Hardware timestamp support  for packet trailers and keyframes generated by Arista 7150 Series and Metawatch. This also includes device information such as the Device ID and the Port ID. BPF support for all ZC devices and queues, both to filter received or transmitted traffic. ZC API extensions to further simplify its use, which is one of the main advantages of this …
nDPI

Released nDPI 3.4: increased detection speed, statistical analysis, fuzzing, cybersecurity

This is to announce the release of nDPI 3.4 that is a major step ahead with respect to 3.2: Detection speed has been greatly optimised Many new functions for statistical protocol analysis have been introduced. This is to expand nDPI into traffic analysis beyond simple flow-based analysis. Fuzzing and code analysis (credits to catenacyber and lnslbrty) made nDPI more stable and robust than ever Completely rewritten QUIC dissector (credits to IvanNardi) with support of the latest protocol versions Added 24 security risks for speeding up the adoption of nDPI in …
ntopng

A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Write a ntopng Plugin from Scratch

In ntopng you can write plugins to extend it with custom features. This short tutorial explains you how to do that step-by-step. Here we drive you through the creation of a plugin for generating alerts when an unexpected DNS server is observed: this is useful to spot hosts that have a custom DNS configured or scanners applications. The plugin source code described in this post can be found here and is has been authored by Daniele Zulberti and Luca Argentieri. These are the steps to implement the plugin. Step 1: …
ntop

Using ElasticSearch to Store and Correlate Ntopng Alarms

With the introduction of ntopng endpoints and recipients, it is now possible to handle alerts in a flexible fashion by means of recipients. ntopng embeds a SQLite database for turn-key alert storage and reporting. However in large organizations with many alerts scalability of this solution is limited due to the limited number of records (16k) that can be handled. In the latest ntopng 4.1.x versions it is now possible to export alerts in an external ElasticSearch database (not available in the community edition). This post shows you how to use …
ntopng

Using ntopng Recipients and Endpoints for Flexible Alert Handling

In the latest ntopng 4.1.x versions (and soon 4.2) we have completely reworked the way alerts are delivered to subscribers. Up to 4.0 the ntopng engine was configured in a single way for all alerts: go to the preferences page and specify where to deliver alerts. This was suboptimal for many reasons, including the fact that it was not possible to send alerts to different recipients on different channels, or selectively decide when send alerts out. For this reason we have introduced the concept of Endpoints server account configuration where …
nDPI

How Great Hashing Can (More Than) Double Application Performance

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 keys such as VLAN can be added if necessary). This usually requires a lookup in an hash table, by using an hash function to translate the key into an index for an array with collision …
nDPI

How to Dump, Index, and Layer-7 Filter Network Traffic at High Speed

n2disk is an application that many of the ntop community uses to dump traffic up to 100 Gbit. What few people know is that n2disk can index data not just using packet header information (i.e. IP, port. VLAN, MAC…) but also using nDPI to produce an index that contains application protocol information. This filtering can happen: During packet capture (i.e. instruct n2disk to avoid dumping specific protocols such as Netflix or YouTube that take up a lot of disk space and that are usually harmless). While extracting packets from stored …