A Deep Dive Into Traffic Fingerprints

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Last week during SharkFest Europe 2024 we have presented what are network fingerprints and how they work. During the talk we (Luca and Ivan) have described how we have extended nDPI with support of network fingerprints, and how this work has been also integrated in Wireshark. We believe that fingerprints are an interesting technology that […]

How First Packet Classification (FPC) Works in nDPI

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Starting with nDPI 4.10, we have introduced a new feature called First Packet Classification (FPC). Goal of this technique is to address one problem of DPI that detects a protocol only when traffic has been dissected. This means that for TLS you need a few packets (usually between 5 and 10) for protocol dissection, as […]

Positioning ntopng vs nProbe for Traffic Analysis

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Recently we have compared the use of nDPI in a realtime application (ntopng) and a near-realtime (nProbe). We have captured a short pcap with some mixed traffic and analysed it with both applications. The expectation was to find comparable results between the two applications, but this happened only partially. This blog posts explains the main […]

Advancements in Traffic Processing Using Programmable Hardware Flow Offload

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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 […]

nDPI: Internals and Frequent Questions

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All ntop tools are based on nDPI but not every use is familiar with nDPI internals. We often receive questions about it, and it’s time to answer frequent questions. Q: How nDPI implements protocol detection? A: nDPI includes a list of protocol dissectors (356 as of today) that are able to dissect protocols such as […]

nDPI 4.8 is Now Available: Better Performance with Less Memory, Fuzzy Robustness, Many New Protocols

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This is to announce the release of nDPI 4.8 that introduces various new protocols (in total 351 protocols and 53 risks), several internal changes to improve packet processing, extension of fuzzing to new components to improve coverage, new algorithms for handling lists with reduced memory and better performance. Protocol changes have been introduced not just […]

How nDPI Improved Bloom Filters Implementation

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A Bloom filter is. probabilistic data-structure used to test whether an element is present in a set. Blooms are affected by false positives, meaning that when a bloom returns true it does not mean that the searched element is part of the set but that it is “likely” to be part of the set. nDPI […]

How nDPI Identifies Fully Encrypted Protocols

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In the paper How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic it is described a technique used in censorship to identify and block fully encrypted protocols. This technique, limited to TCP flows, uses a few techniques that are applied on the first TCP packet with payload, making it fast and convenient […]