Network Management and

Monitoring

Introduction to Netflow

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 Agenda

1. Netflow
– What it is and how it works
– Uses and applications
2. Generating and exporting flow records
3. Nfdump and Nfsen
– Architecture
– Usage
4. Lab
 What is a Network Flow
●
A set of related packets
●
Packets that belong to the same transport
connection. e.g.
– TCP, same src IP, src port, dst IP, dst port
– UDP, same src IP, src port, dst IP, dst port
– Some tools consider "bidirectional flows", i.e. A->B
and B->A as part of the same flow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_flow_(computer_networking)
 Simple flows

= Packet belonging to flow X

= Packet belonging to flow Y
 Cisco IOS Definition of a Flow
●
Unidirectional sequence of packets sharing:
– Source IP address
– Destination IP address
– Source port for UDP or TCP, 0 for other protocols
– Destination port for UDP or TCP, type and code for ICMP,
or 0 for other protocols
– IP protocol
– Ingress interface (SNMP ifIndex)
– IP Type of Service
IOS: which of these six packets are in
the same flows?
Src IP Dst IP Protocol Src Port Dst Port

A 1.2.3.4 5.6.7.8 6 (TCP) 4001 22

B 5.6.7.8 1.2.3.4 6 (TCP) 22 4001

C 1.2.3.4 5.6.7.8 6 (TCP) 4002 80

D 1.2.3.4 5.6.7.8 6 (TCP) 4001 80

E 1.2.3.4 8.8.8.8 17 (UDP) 65432 53

F 8.8.8.8 1.2.3.4 17 (UDP) 53 65432

IOS: which of these six packets are in
the same flows?
Src IP Dst IP Protocol Src Port Dst Port

A 1.2.3.4 5.6.7.8 6 (TCP) 4001 22

B 5.6.7.8 1.2.3.4 6 (TCP) 22 4001

C 1.2.3.4 5.6.7.8 6 (TCP) 4002 80

D 1.2.3.4 5.6.7.8 6 (TCP) 4001 80

E 1.2.3.4 8.8.8.8 17 (UDP) 65432 53

F 8.8.8.8 1.2.3.4 17 (UDP) 53 65432

What about packets “C” and “D”?
 Flow Accounting
●
A summary of all the packets seen in a flow (so far):
– Flow identification: protocol, src/dst IP/port...
– Packet count
– Byte count
– Start and end times
– Maybe additional info, e.g. AS numbers, netmasks
●
Records traffic volume and type but not content
 Uses and Applications
●
You can answer questions like:
– Which user / department has been uploading /
downloading the most?
– Which are the most commonly-used protocols on my
network?
– Which devices are sending the most SMTP traffic, and to
where?
●
Identification of anomalies and attacks
●
More fine-grained visualisation (graphing) than can
be done at the interface level
 Working with flows

1. Configure device (e.g. router) to generate flow

accounting records
2. Export the flows from the device (router) to a
collector (PC)
– Configure protocol version and destination
3. Receive the flows, write them to disk
4. Analyse the flows

Many tools available, both free and commercial

 Where to generate flow records

1. On a router or other network device

– If the device supports it
– No additional hardware required
– Might have some impact on performance
2. Passive collector (usually a Unix host)
– Receives a copy of every packet and generates
flows
– Requires a mirror port
– Resource intensive
 Flow Collection

LAN LAN

LAN
LAN

flow
records
Internet

Flow collector
stores exported flows from router.
 Flow Collection
●
All flows through router can be observed
●
Router overhead to process & export flows
●
Can select which interfaces Netflow collection
is needed on and not activate it on others
●
If router on each LAN, Netflow can be
activated on them to reduce load on core
router
 Passive Monitor Collection

ALL
Workstation A PACKETS Workstation B

Flow probe connected

to switch port in “traffic
mirror” mode
flow
records Campus

Flow collector
 Passive Collector
●
Examples
– softflowd (Linux/BSD)
– pfflowd (BSD)
– ng_netflow (BSD)
●
Collector sees all traffic through the network
point it is connected on and generates flows
●
Relieves router from processing traffic,
creating flows and exporting them
 Passive Collector
●
Useful on links:
– with only one entry into the network
– where only flows from one section of the network
are needed
●
Can be deployed in conjunction with an IDS
 A thought:

Your network probably already has a device

which is keeping track of IP addresses and port
numbers of traffic flowing through it.

What is it?
 Flow Export Protocols
●
Cisco Netflow, different versions
– v5: widely deployed
– v9: newer, extensible, includes IPv6 support
●
IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX):
– IETF standard, based on Netflow v9
●
sFlow: Sampling-based, commonly found on
switches
●
jFlow: Juniper
●
We use Netflow, but many tools support multiple
protocols
 Cisco Netflow
●
Unidirectional flows
●
IPv4 unicast and multicast
– (IPv6 in Netflow v9)
●
Flows exported via UDP
– Choose a port. No particular standard, although
2055 and 9996 are commonly used
●
Supported on IOS, ASA and CatOS platforms
– but with different implementations
 Cisco IOS Configuration
●
Configured on each interface
– Inbound and outbound
– Older IOS only allows input
●
Define the version
●
Define the IP address and port of the collector (where
to send the flows)
●
Optionally enable aggregation tables
●
Optionally configure flow timeout and main (v5) flow
table size
●
Optionally configure sample rate
 Configuring Netflow: the old way
●
Enable CEF
ip cef
ipv6 cef
●
Enable flow on each interface
ip route cache flow (pre IOS 12.4)
OR
ip flow ingress (IOS 12.4 onwards)
ip flow egress
●
Exporting Flows to a collector
ip flow-export version [5|9] [origin-as|peer-as]
ip flow-export destination <x.x.x.x> <udp-port>
 “Flexible Netflow”: the new way
●
Only way to monitor IPv6 flows on modern IOS
●
Start using it now – IPv6 is coming / here
●
Many mind-boggling options available, but
basic configuration is straightforward
 Flexible Netflow Configuration
●
Define one or more exporters

flow exporter EXPORTER-1

destination 192.0.2.99
transport udp 9996
source Loopback0
template data timeout 300
 Flexible Netflow Configuration
●
Define one or more flow monitors

flow monitor FLOW-MONITOR-V4

exporter EXPORTER-1
cache timeout active 300
record netflow ipv4 original-input

flow monitor FLOW-MONITOR-V6

exporter EXPORTER-1
cache timeout active 300
record netflow ipv6 original-input
 Flexible Netflow Configuration
●
Apply flow monitors to active interface

interface GigabitEthernet0/0/0
ip flow monitor FLOW-MONITOR-V4 input
ip flow monitor FLOW-MONITOR-V4 output
ipv6 flow monitor FLOW-MONITOR-V6 input
ipv6 flow monitor FLOW-MONITOR-V6 output
 “Top-talkers”
●
You can summarize flows directly on the router, e.g.
show flow monitor FLOW-MONITOR-V4 cache aggregate ipv4 source
address ipv4 destination address sort counter bytes top 20
●
Yes, that's one long command!
●
Old command not available for Flexible Netflow
show ip flow top-talkers
–Make an Alias:
conf t
alias exec top-talkers show flow..
Questions?
 Collecting flows: nfdump
●
Free and open source – Runs on collector
●
nfcapd listens for incoming flow records and
writes them to disk (flat files)
– typically starts a new file every 5 minutes
●
nfdump reads the files and turns them into
human-readable output
●
nfdump has command-line options to filter and
aggregate the flows
 nfdump architecture

flow
records

nfcapd daemon

flat files

nfdump command line

Date flow start Duration Proto Src IP Addr:Port Dst IP Addr:Port Packets Bytes Flows
2013-04-18 13:35:23.353 1482.000 UDP 10.10.0.119:55555 -> 190.83.150.177:54597 8683 445259 1
2013-04-18 13:35:23.353 1482.000 UDP 190.83.150.177:54597 -> 10.10.0.119:55555 8012 11.1 M 1
2013-04-18 13:48:21.353 704.000 TCP 196.38.180.96:6112 -> 10.10.0.119:62099 83 20326 1
2013-04-18 13:48:21.353 704.000 TCP 10.10.0.119:62099 -> 196.38.180.96:6112 105 5085 1
 Analysing flows: nfsen
●
Companion to nfdump
●
Web GUI
●
Creates RRD graphs of traffic totals
●
Lets you zoom in to a time of interest and do nfdump
analysis
●
Manages nfcapd instances for you
– Can run multiple nfcapd instances for listening to flows
from multiple routers
●
Plugins available like port tracker, surfmap
 nfsen architecture
flow
records

nfcapd

flat files (every 5 minutes)

ALL TCP UDP ICMP other filter

sum

graph
 nfsen: points to note
●
Every 5 minutes nfcapd starts a new file, and
nfsen processes the previous one
●
Hence each graph point covers 5 minutes
●
The graph shows you the total of selected
traffic in that 5-minute period
●
To get more detailed information on the
individual flows in that period, the GUI lets you
drill down using nfdump
 Demonstration

Now we will use nfsen to find biggest users of

bandwidth
 Profiles and Channels
●
A "channel" identifies a type of traffic to graph,
and a "profile" is a collection of channels which
can be shown together
●
You can create your own profiles and
channels, and hence graphs. e.g.
– Total HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP traffic (etc)
– Traffic to and from the Science department
– ...
●
Use filters to define the traffic of interest
 Profiles and Channels

"Profile"

"Channel" "Channel" "Channel" "Channel" "Channel"

HTTP HTTPS SMTP POP3 IMAP filter

sum

graph
 References – Tools
●
nfdump and nfsen:
http://nfdump.sourceforge.net/
http://nfsen.sourceforge.net/
http://nfsen-plugins.sourceforge.net/
●
pmacct and pmgraph:
http://www.pmacct.net/
http://www.aptivate.org/pmgraph/
●
flow-tools:
http://www.splintered.net/sw/flow-tools
 References – Further Info
●
WikiPedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflow
●
IETF standards effort:
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ipfix-charter.html
●
Abilene NetFlow page
http://abilene-netflow.itec.oar.net/
●
Cisco Centric Open Source Community http://cosi-
nms.sourceforge.net/related.html
●
Cisco NetFlow Collector User Guide
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/netflow_collection
_engine/6.0/tier_one/user/guide/user.html
 The End
●
(Additional reference materials follow)
 Filter Examples
any all traffic
proto tcp only TCP traffic
dst host 1.2.3.4 only traffic to 1.2.3.4
dst net 10.10.1.0/24 only traffic to that range
not dst net 10.10.1.0/24 only traffic not to that range
proto tcp and src port 80 only TCP with source port 80
dst net 10.10.1.0/24 or dst net 10.10.2.0/24
only traffic to those nets
dst net 10.10.1.0/24 and proto tcp and src port 80
only HTTP response traffic to that net
(dst net 10.10.1.0/24 or dst net 10.10.2.0/24) and proto tcp and src
port 80
...more complex combinations possible
Flows and Applications

More Examples
 Uses for Netflow
●
Problem identification / solving
– Traffic classification
– DoS Traceback (some slides by Danny McPherson)
●
Traffic Analysis and Engineering
– Inter-AS traffic analysis
– Reporting on application proxies
●
Accounting (or billing)
– Cross verification from other sources
– Can cross-check with SNMP data
Detect Anomalous Events: SQL
‘Slammer’ Worm*
 Flow-based Detection (cont)*
●
Once baselines are built anomalous activity can be
detected
– Pure rate-based (pps or bps) anomalies may be legitimate or
malicious
– Many misuse attacks can be immediately recognized, even
without baselines (e.g., TCP SYN or RST floods)
– Signatures can also be defined to identify “interesting”
transactional data (e.g., proto udp and port 1434 and 404
octets(376 payload) == slammer!)
– Temporal compound signatures can be defined to detect
with higher precision
Flow-based Commercial Tools…*
Commercial Detection: A Large Scale
DOS Attack
 Accounting
●
Flow based accounting can be a good
supplement to SNMP based accounting.
Cisco Netflow Versions
 Netflow v1
●
Key fields: Source/Destination IP, Source/Destination
Port, IP Protocol, ToS, Input interface.
●
Accounting: Packets, Octets, Start/End time, Output
interface
●
Other: Bitwise OR of TCP flags.
●
Does not have sequence numbers – no way to detect
lost flows
●
Obsolete
 Netflow v2 to v4
●
Cisco internal
●
Were never released
 Netflow v5
• Key fields: Source/Destination IP, Source/Destination
Port, IP Protocol, ToS, Input interface.
• Accounting: Packets, Octets, Start/End time, Output
interface.
• Other: Bitwise OR of TCP flags, Source/Destination
AS and IP Mask.
• Packet format adds sequence numbers for detecting
lost exports.
• IPv4 only
 Netflow v6 & v7
●
Used exclusively on the Cisco Catalyst line of
ethernet switches
●
Requires the Netflow Feature Card, a
specialist forwarding engine for the Catalyst
Switches
●
Not compatible or comparable with Netflow on
Cisco routers
 Netflow v8
●
Aggregated v5 flows.
●
Not all flow types available on all equipment
●
Much less data to post process, but loses fine
granularity of v5 – no IP addresses.
 Netflow v9
●
IPv6 support
●
32-bit ASN support
●
Additional fields like MPLS labels
●
Builds on earlier versions
●
Periodically sends "template" packet, all flow
data fields reference the template