Mastering Network Flow Traffic Analysis

The book aims to familiarize the readers with network traffic analysis technologies, giving a thorough understanding of the differences between active and passive network traffic analysis, and the advantages and disadvantages of each methodology. It has a special focus on network flow traffic analysis which, due to its scalability, privacy, ease of implementation, and effectiveness, is already playing a key role in the field of network security.

Starting from network infrastructures, going through protocol implementations and their configuration on the most widely deployed devices on the market, the book will show you how to take advantage of network traffic flows by storing them on Elastic solutions to OLAP databases, by creating advanced reports, and by showing how to develop monitoring systems.

CISOs, CIOs, network engineers, SOC analysts, secure DevOps, and other people eager to learn, will get sensitive skills and the knowledge to improve the security of the networks they are in charge of, that go beyond the traditional packet filtering approach.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

* Implement flow analysis across diverse network topologies, and identify blind spots.
* Enable flow export from virtualized (VMware, Proxmox) and server environments.
* Ingest and structure raw flow data within Elasticsearch and Clickhouse platforms.
* Analyze flow data using queries for patterns, anomalies, and threat detection.
* Understand and leverage the network flow matrix for security, capacity insights.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

This book is for network engineers, security analysts (SOC analysts, incident responders), network administrators, and secure DevOps professionals seeking to enhance their network security skills beyond traditional methods. A foundational understanding of network topologies, the OSI and TCP/IP models, basic network data capture concepts, and familiarity with Linux environments is recommended.

1. Foundation of Network Flow Analysis
2. Fixed and Dynamic Length Flow Protocols
3. Network Topologies
4. Implementing Flow Export on Layer 2 Devices
5. Implementing Flow Export on Layer 3 Devices
6. Implementing Flow Export on Servers
7. Implementing Flow Export on Virtualization Platforms
8. Ingesting Data into Clickhouse and Elasticsearch
9. Flow Data Analysis: Exploring Data for Fun and Profit
10. Understanding the Flow Matrix
11. Firewall Rules Optimization Use Case
12. Simple Network Anomaly Detection System Based on Flow Data Analysis

Gilberto Persico is a Unix system, networking, and security engineer with over 30 years of experience in the IT world, working as a programmer, architect, security auditor, and systems and network engineer. He worked for IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Huawei both as an employee and as a freelancer, designing, developing, and supporting production-ready enterprise-grade architectures for dozens of very important customers. He also conceived, designed, and developed Fl0wer, a new generation network flow analysis product, and deployed it in a big setup, successfully controlling two big data centers. He plays cello in his free time and raises a daughter when not hacking things in his lab. He also loves resurrecting old systems, retro-computing, and is currently works as a NOC team leader in Econocom.