nDPI

nDPI

How Lockdown Changed Corporate Internet Connectivity
Global lockdown has forced many people to work from remote: empty offices, all remote working until the emergency is over.   In essence during the lockdown remote workers used very few corporate services via VPN, with relatively light traffic (e.g. accounting) and the heavy videoconferencing traffic not propagating in the company networks: this as moderns videoconferencing solutions are all cloud based. So in essence moving to remote working has not put too much pressure on corporate networks beside the creation of VPN accounts or other limited changes. As you can …
nDPI

You’re invited to the future of nDPI: Python, Cybersecurity and Behaviour. May 15th, 4PM CET
Hi all, this is to invite you to an open discussion about nDPI, its future. In particular Python bindings, cybersecurity extensions and behaviour analysis. We will meet at 4PM CET (10AM EST) live on the Internet. For those who have not been able to join, this is the video of the session. Links: https://github.com/aouinizied/nfstream https://notebooks.gesis.org/binder/jupyter/user/aouinizied-nfstream-tutorials-mg04vt7x/tree Enjoy! …
nDPI

Trickbot Malware Analysis Using nDPI and ntopng
Trickbot is a malware distributed via malspam, spam emails containing links for downloading malicious files that infect computers.  A pcap file of a trickbot infection named 2019-09-25-Trickbot-gtag-ono19-infection-traffic.pcap can be downloaded at this URL. You can analyse the file using nDPI as follows ndpiReader -i 2019-09-25-Trickbot-gtag-ono19-infection-traffic.pcap -v 2 -J > /tmp/trickbot.txt Let’s now open the trickbot.txt file and search for “Risk”. This is a tag added to nDPI analysed flows when there is a non-zero security risk associated with the analysed traffic. Most problems include: Obsolete TLS protocol with self-signed certificate …
nDPI

Towards Traffic Behaviour Analysis: Introducing nDPI 3.2
This is to announce the new stable release of nDPI 3.2. The main trend of nDPI is to move from “simple” application protocol detection towards behavioral traffic interpretation. This has been implemented with the integration of modules for detecting attacks (e.g. SQL injections and XSS in HTTP) and behavioral indications on packet length/time/entropy as well indicators used for creating simple indicators typical of IDS systems. In essence nDPI is moving from protocol reporting to comprehensive traffic interpretation. nDPI now includes functions for efficiently serialising data in both JSON and binary …
nDPI

Effective TLS Fingerprinting Beyond JA3
JA3 is a popular method to fingerprint TLS connections used by many monitoring tools and IDSs. JA3 focuses on encryption options specified during TLS connection setup to fingerprint the encryption library used by the application. Image courtesy of Cisco So in essence the same JA3 fingerprint will match multiple applications, making JA3 unreliable (when used as single feature) to fingerprint traffic. There are several JA3 fingerprint databases available on the Internet you can use to identify (remember with some grade of uncertainty, thus with false positives) client applications or malware …
nDPI

Encrypted Traffic Analysis: A Primer
Monitoring encrypted traffic is must for providing visibility in modern traffic. Due to this we’ve put a lot of energy in extending nDPI so that it could be useful in this context. DPI (deep packet inspection) however is not enough for complete visibility, and thus we have started to add classification techniques and algorithm to nDPI to merge visibility and behavioural analysis. In fact flow-based analysis is not enough to understand what’s happening on a network without having a big picture. An this is what we’re doing in our tools, …
nDPI

Rethinking Network Flow Visualisation
Traffic monitoring applications often aggregate traffic in flows, that in essence is a way to divide traffic according to a 5-tuple key (Protocol, IP/port source/destination). Flows are then aggregated for instance according to IP address or protocol, and often represented with timeseries as the one below. What is missing in all this is how the traffic is distributed over time as everything is flattened, protocols are merged (for instance according the source IP address) and it is not possible to understand intra-flow relationships. For instance to see that when I …
nDPI

How to use nDPI from CLI to analyse network traffic
Most people use nDPI indirectly being it part of ntopng and many other non-ntop developed tools. However not many people know that nDPI can also be used from the command line to analyse network traffic. This is useful to create scripts to automate detection of specific issues. ndpiReader is a testing tool used to demonstrate the library features as well run validation tests. With this tool is also possible to generate a report in CSV format that can be analysed with tools such as q. Below you can find some …
nDPI

Introducing nDPI v3: Encrypted/Malware Traffic Analysis with Ease
Those who though that DPI died with the advent of traffic encryption should play with nDPI v3 that we’re introducing today. As already discussed, the pervasive use of encrypted traffic requires a new mindset when analysing network traffic. We decided to enhance nDPI adding the best traffic analysis techniques available today, in particular Cisco Joy, and facilities for calculating metrics such as entropy, standard deviation etc. that can be used to identify hidden traffic properties otherwise invisible. Thanks to all this, nDPI is now able to report if a SSH …
nDPI

How Encryption Changed Network Traffic (Monitoring). Finally.
For years traffic monitoring tools assumed traffic was in clear text. This because when the Internet was created all the main protocols such as DNS, HTTP, SMTP, Telnet, POP were in clear. With this practice it was easy to report let’s say the breakdown of DNS response codes, or detect force brute attacks on HTTP authentication. With the advent of traffic encryption, the (bad?) practice of inspecting traffic was no longer possible and network developers had several headaches. Those who were unable to see new opportunities with traffic encryption started …
nDPI

New Challenges in DPI Protocol Detection
In the early Internet days, each network protocol was designed for a specific purpose: SMTP for sending emails, HTTP for the web and so on. In order to make sure that implementations where compliant with the specification, there was an RFC per protocol describing it. If a connection was starting with a protocol, let’s say SMTP, for the duration of the connection that was a SMTP connection meaning that the protocol behind a given connection was persistent for its duration. This in the early days. Unfortunately the modern Internet does …
nDPI

TLS/SSL Analysis: When Encryption and Safety Are Not Alike
Most people think that SSL means safety. While this is not a false statement, you should not take it for granted. In fact while your web browser warns you when a certain encrypted communication has issues (for instance them SSL certificates don’t match), you should not assume that SSL = HTTPS, as: TLS/SSL encryption is becoming (fortunately) pervasive also for non web-based communications. The web browser can warn you for the main URL, but you should look onto the browser development console for other alerts (most people ignore the existence …

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