As traffic rate increases, it is important to tune packet processing in order to avoid drops and thus educe visibility. This post will show you a few tricks for improving the overall performance and better exploit modern multicore systems. The Problem ntopng packet processing performance depends on the number of ingress pps (packets per second) […]
Introducing Modbus Traffic Monitoring in ntopng
Modbus is an industrial protocol used to communicate with automation devices. The initial protocol version was implemented over a serial layer, whereas the current version named ModbusTCP is a variant of the original protocol running over TCP/IP. This blog post describes how ntopng monitors ModbusTCP traffic: it detects Modbus flows via nDPI and dissects them […]
Enabling Zeek and Suricata On-Demand at 40/100 Gbit using PF_RING
Overview Those of you who have some experience with IDS or IPS systems, like Zeek and Suricata, are probably aware of how CPU intensive and memory consuming those applications are due to the nature of the activities they carry on (e.g. signatures matching). This leads to high system load and packet loss when the packet […]
OpenAPI: ntopng REST API for Software Developers
Maybe not all of you know that ntopng powers in some popular monitoring systems such as CheckMK and Centreon. The integration is made possible through the ntopng REST API (REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer) that allows developers to manipulate ntopng configuration and query monitored information including hosts, flows, alerts and historical data. Recently we […]
OT, ICS, SCADA: IEC 60870-5-104 in ntopng
What is OT, ICS, SCADA ? Operational Technology (OT) refers to computing systems that are used to manage industrial operations or process operations, like water treatment, electrical power distribution or wrapping a chocolate in foil. ntopng supports some Industrial control systems (ICS) protocol often managed via a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Via […]
Introducing Smart Recording in n2disk: Combining Cybersecurity with Packet-to-Disk
In short Continuous network traffic recorders are applications (or appliances) that write network traffic on disk. In case of issues (e.g. security breach or network outage) they enable network and security analysts to go back in time and see how a problem originated. The main limitation of this practice is that a lot of data […]
Now available ntopng/nprobe ARM64 Docker Images
Supporting 64 bit ARM platforms is important because there is now a plethora of inexpensive boards based on this architecture. Thanks to the use of docker containers, several manufacturers allow their devices to take advantage of this technology to run third-party software on devices that used to be not extensible. Here you can read how […]
How To Analyse Asymmetric VLAN Traffic
A VLAN is a method for partitioning a layer two broadcast domain creating virtual networks of homogeneous systems hence promoting network segmentation. A ethernet port with no VLAN tag is called access port, whereas a switch port with VLAN-tagged packets is called tagged or trunk port. End systems are usually connected to access ports meaning […]
How Flow-Based Traffic Classification Works
Many ntop products such as ntopng, nProbe, and PF_RING FT just to name a few are based on network flows. However not all our users know in detail what is a network flow, and how it works in practice. This blog post describes what they are and how they work in practice. What is a […]
Going Beyond 5-Tuple in Network Flow Analysis
Traditionally flow-based tools are based on the 5-tuple attributes (source and destination IP, source and destination port and the protocol field). Often they are complemented with additional attributes such as VLAN or Tunnel Id in order to avoid mixing in the same flow packets that belong to different communications. The above picture shows the 5-tuple […]