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Announce

Cento 2.6: ClickHouse Support, Enhanced Tunnel Visibility, PQC, and more
We are pleased to announce the release of cento 2.6, bringing a broad set of new capabilities and improvements to high-performance traffic processing and flow export. This release expands cento’s integration with the ntop ecosystem, adds new visibility into tunneled traffic, introduces Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) support, and delivers important improvements across protocol dissection, security, and performance. ClickHouse Export Cento 2.6 introduces ClickHouse export support, using a schema compatible with ntopng. This makes it easier to feed high-volume flow data into ClickHouse-based deployments and integrate cento into existing ntopng-oriented data pipelines. ClickHouse settings …
cento

Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Analysis
Modern digital security relies on public-key encryption (like RSA and ECC) to protect global data. The future arrival of a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) will completely break these mathematical foundations. To counter this, organizations must migrate to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) — new, math-based algorithms deployed via standard software that quantum computers cannot exploit. The PQC migration requires to protect data “at rest” (i.e. static data stored on physical drives, databases, cloud storage, or backups) and “in transit” (i.e. data transmitted on computer networks, including HTTPs and VPNs). In the latter case quantum …
cento

nProbe Cento at Scale: Flow Offload Acceleration on Napatech
High-speed networks continue to push the limits of software-based monitoring and security applications. As link speeds grow and traffic patterns become more complex, efficiently analyzing packets while maintaining per-flow state, for updating stats and running Deep Packet Inspection, is increasingly challenging. By leveraging on our long term experience with high-speed packet processing, modern architectures, and state of the art data structures, during the past years we developed nProbe Cento, a high-performance NetFlow probe able to keep up with 100+ Gbit/s on adequate servers. However, this requires quite some resources (mainly …
cento

Cento 2.4: Flexible Export, Improved Telco Support
This is to announce the release of cento 2.4, a major update focused on boosting export flexibility, improving telco-grade encapsulation support, and strengthening performance and reliability across the entire data pipeline.This release brings architectural enhancements, new features for ntopng users, and improved compatibility with modern hardware and Linux distributions. Below is an overview of what’s new. Key Features Template-based serialization (JSON/TLV) Cento 2.4 introduces support for template-driven serialization also when exporting data using JSON and TLV (used by ntopng). Users can now define exactly which fields to export, reducing overhead and …
cento

HowTo Measure the Status and Performance of Network Flows
NetFlow has been originally designed to monitor network traffic using simple bytes/packets metrics. For TCP, it is also possible to know what TCP flags (that indicate the connection state) have been used on a flow, as NetFlow/IPFIX exports them as a cumulative OR of all TCP flags of the flow. This allows you to know if a SYN flag has been observed on a flow but not the number of SYN flags that have been reported for a flow. No other information elements have been implemented to report detailed TCP flow …
cento

How ntop Accelerated Network Telescope at Georgia Tech
If you are wondering what is a network telescope and how ntop tools have been used in research, we’re pleased to publish a guest post from Prof. A. Dainotti that describes the project. Enjoy ! At the Internet Intelligence Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing, we have been using nProbe Cento and PF_RING ZC to help us build, monitor, and validate the output of an innovative research infrastructure — a dynamic network telescope — funded by the US National Science Foundation.   A network telescope uses a large …
cento

Handling High Flow Rates: Cento and ntopng at Scale
Cento is a high-speed NetFlow probe designed to analyse traffic from high-speed links (100+ Gbit/s) and export flows toward ntopng, third party collectors or big-data systems. When exporting data to ntopng, Cento uses ZeroMQ (ZMQ) as its primary mechanism for exporting flows in JSON or binary (TLV) format. In short, Cento acts as a ZMQ publisher, sending flow records over a TCP socket. ntopng subscribes to this socket as a ZMQ collector, receiving and processing the flows in real-time. This design allows flexible network deployment, with Cento running on the …
Announce

Released Cento 2.2: Enhanced Flow Offload, QoE Metrics, and GTP Correlation
We’re excited to announce a new release of Cento 2.2, our high-performance flow-based traffic processing engine. This release brings major enhancements in traffic analysis capabilities, particularly for mobile network monitoring, quality assessment, and flow offloading on Napatech adapters. Whether you’re deploying Cento in ISP-grade infrastructures or using it for deep traffic inspection, this release is packed with powerful new features and improvements designed to push performance and visibility to the next level. Full Flow Table Offload on Napatech Adapters Cento 2.2 now offers fully-fledged Flow Table offload support with the …
cento

Exporting (Custom) Flows with Avro in nProbe Cento
This summer we introduced nProbe Cento 2.0. Before this release, Cento was supporting JSON serialization only when exporting flows to Kafka. JSON is straightforward and widely used, but it can be verbose and less efficient for high-throughput or resource-sensitive environments. To address these challenges, when exporting flows to ntopng, some time ago we introduced a binary/TLV format for data serialization, implemented in our open-source nDPI library. However, despite this being an open format, it is not widely used. For this reason, in order to improve interoperability with other solutions, we …
cento

Released Cento 2.0: Hardware Flow Table Offload, Avro Export and Much More
This is to announce that Cento 2.0 is out! This new major release introduces many new great features. First of all it adds support for offloading flows to Napatech SmartNICs featuring Flow Manager. This new feature has been presented at IEEE HPSR (IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing) and demonstrated to provide a significant performance boost and dramatically reduce the PCIe and memory bandwidth utilisation when processing 100 Gbit (or more) links with full-speed traffic. This can be used both by standard cento to accelerate passive monitoring, …
cento

Advancements in Traffic Processing Using Programmable Hardware Flow Offload
This week we have presented at the IEEE HPSR (IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing) our latest work that shows how nProbe can benefit of acceleration provided by modern SmartNICs to achieving multi-100 Gbit traffic processing (both passive and inline) on low-end servers while deep-packet inspecting traffic using nDPI. If you want to know more about it, you can view the presentation slides, or read thw paper. Your feedback is welcome. Enjoy ! …
cento

HowTo Build a 100 Gbit NetFlow Sensor Using nProbe Cento
When it comes to monitor a distributed network, to get a picture of the Network traffic flowing through the uplinks or on critical Network segments, NetFlow like technologies are usually the answer. nProbe Pro/Enterprise and nProbe Cento are software probes that can be used to build versatile sensors able to export flow information in many different formats, including NetFlow v5/v9/IPFIX, Kafka, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, MySQL, CSV files, etc. All this at very high speed. nProbe Pro/Enterprise has been designed for low/mid rate (1/10 Gbps) while nProbe Cento has been designed to …

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