nDPI

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

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 …
Announce

Join FOSDEM 2021 ntop sessions, Sat-Sun Feb 6-7th (online)
We are proud to announce that a couple of talks have been accepted at FOSDEM 2021, one of the most important FOSS conferences in the world that this yar will take place online due to the pandemic. In the Network monitoring, discovery and inventory devroom we will give two presentations titled “Using nDPI for  Monitoring and Security” and  “ntopng network monitoring and discovery“. In addition, ntop has been given a virtual stand to present its opensource-related activities. The ntop team will always be available in a chatroom and a series …
nDPI

Efficiently Detecting and Blocking SunBurst Malware
Earlier this month a new highly evasive malware attacker named SunBurst has been disclosed. Immediately some countermeasures have been disclosed and in particular some Snort/Suricata rules have been published. We have analysed the rules trying to figure out if ntop tools could detect and block Sunburst and the answer is yes, you can. Let’s have a look at some of the rules. The first thing you can observe is that the rules are any/any, meaning that an IDS has to look into every single connection this because most IDS do …
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 …
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 …
nDPI

Monitoring Industrial IoT/Scada Traffic with nDPI and ntopng
Monitoring Industrial IoT and SCADA traffic can be challenging as most open source monitoring tools are designed for Internet protocols. As this is becoming a hot topic with companies automating production lines, we have decided to enhance ntop tools to provide our user community traffic visibility even in industrial environments. This has required to enhance nDPI to detect these protocols and enhance ntopng, our monitoring console, to visualize this traffic by providing enhanced protocol dissection on top of which alerts can be triggered. To date, nDPI supports modbus, DNP3 and …
Cybersecurity

How to Detect Domain Hiding (a.k.a. as Domain Fronting)
Domain fronting is a technique that was used in 2010s by mobile apps to attempt to bypass censorship. The technique relies on a “front” legitimate domain that basically acts as a pivot for the forbidden domain. In essence an attacker performs a HTTPS connection where in the DNS (used to resolve the domain name) and TLS SNI the legitimate domain name is used, whereas inside the HTTP connection in the “Host” HTTP header it specifies the forbidden domain Recently at DEF CON 28 a new tool named Noctilucent has been …
nDPI

Introducing nDPI Risk Analysis for (Cybersecurity) Network Traffic Analysis (was Ripple20)
Earlier last month Ripple20 became popular as it has listed some vulnerabilities found in a custom IP stack used by many IoT devices. Despite the hype on Ripple20, in essence the tool used to fingerprint vulnerable devices sends either malformed or valid (with some values in the allowed range albeit with values deprecated or obsolete) packets that are easy to catch (see Suricata and Zeek rules for detection). In essence IDS rules/scripts are checking whether packets sent on the wire are valid or if they contain unexpected values used by …
nDPI

Howto Identify and Block Telegram-based Botnets
Botnets are a popular way to run malware on a network using the command and control paradigm. Popular protocols used by botnets include IRC and HTTP. Most IDSs can detect bots as long as they can inspect the network traffic. This makes networks administrators blind when bots move to encrypted and cloud-based (i.e. that you cannot block with a simple IP-based ACL) protocols. The popular Telegram messaging system allows people to create a bot in minutes as shown in the code excerpt below.   bot = Bot(token) def run(): """ …
nDPI

Why Traffic Behaviour Analysis is Good (was Encrypting TLS 1.3 Traffic)
In the latest nDPI meetup, we have discussed future directions, including extending the current encrypted traffic analysis features. Currently nDPI supports both fingerprint and behaviour encrypted traffic analysis techniques to provide TLS traffic visibility. At ntop we have never liked too much fingerprinting techniques such as JA3 that are used by many popular IDSs and security tools, simply because they often lead to false positives making them a “nice to have” features but nothing more than that. Recently the IETF is designing a new TLS 1.3 extension named ECHO (Encrypted …

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