The axiom “you can’t secure what you can’t see” rings truer than ever. Security professionals increasingly rely on network telemetry to gain visibility into their environments, understand normal versus abnormal behavior, and detect threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The challenge, however, lies in the sheer volume and dynamic nature of network data. Manually setting and managing security thresholds quickly becomes unmanageable, leading to a need for more sophisticated approaches to discern malicious activity from legitimate traffic. This is where robust network observability, leveraging advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, plays a pivotal role in strengthening an organization’s security posture.
Introducing cPacket and Network Observability
cPacket, a company with roots dating back to 2007, has evolved from building specialized chips for hardware-offloaded packet processing to offering comprehensive network observability solutions. Its core mission is to provide pervasive visibility and precise performance monitoring for “zero downtime enterprises” such as financial institutions, healthcare providers, and government agencies that demand absolute packet precision and performance. While not explicitly a security company, cPacket’s network observability features can augment and strengthen existing security tools and workflows, rather than replace them.
cPacket’s approach emphasizes seeing everything that happens on the network. The tools support hybrid on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud deployments, ensuring the tools can manage all network data regardless of its origin. A key advantage is cPacket’s independence from application logs; if a malicious actor compromises an application and alters logs, cPacket still captures the real network activity, providing an untampered record. This pervasive and scalable capture capability can inspect trillions of packets per day, extract billions of sessions, and ultimately make sense of the data for both network health and security purposes.
Data Processing and Analytics Architecture
Designed for high-speed, comprehensive data processing and analytics, the architecture comprises these key components:
- Monitoring Points—which can be physical taps, SPANs, or virtual taps, at crucial concentration points across the network, including data centers, collocation facilities, branch offices, campuses, and cloud environments.
- Packet Broker—distinguished by having FPGAs and ASICs on every single on-premises network port, enabling the inspection and counting of every packet at full line rate (maxing out at 1.6 Tbps).
- Packet Capture (cStore)—capturing and saving packets to disk at speeds up to 200 Gbps. The cStore records, indexes, and analyzes packets, monitoring session length, duration, and latency. It can store billions of sessions daily with up to 2 PB on-device, and more when using external object storage. The cStore supports deep packet inspection (DPI), including decoding of relevant protocols such as HTTPS, DNS, and LDAP to extract relevant metadata and performance data for deeper insights. It’s important to note that cPacket does not decrypt encrypted data; for encrypted traffic inspection, cPacket relies on external decryption services.
- Control Center—providing centralized view and control for all distributed monitoring points. It collects, enriches, and analyzes metrics, using AI to transform raw data into “insights” – concise descriptions of what, when, and where anomalies occurred, correlating multiple incidents into a single, actionable card. The Control Center supports REST and MCP, facilitating easy integration with third-party security solutions like NDRs and SIEMs.
For cloud deployments, cPacket utilizes the same software for packet capture, running natively in environments like AWS, GCP, and Azure. It supports various traffic mirroring options and can maximize the throughput of a single instance. Network and security architects often deploy cPacket with multiple instances for scalability.
Incident Detection
cPacket offers both deterministic incident detection and AI-enhanced anomaly detection. Security teams use deterministic detection when they can establish clear, predefined thresholds.
Deterministic detection can leverage cPacket’s FPGAs to search for specific keyword strings to rapidly detect known indicators of compromise (IOCs). The system counts and compares packet ratios in real-time, such as the TCP SYN/SYN-ACK ratio for SYN flood attacks or abnormal DNS responses for DNS amplification attacks. cPacket can identify long-duration TCP sessions (spanning days or weeks) with minimal data transfer, which are characteristic of Command and Control (C2) channels.
While not a replacement for traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), cPacket’s deterministic tools provide rapid detection for known Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), particularly for unencrypted traffic like DNS.
When defining manual thresholds becomes unmanageable, cPacket uses AI to establish a baseline of normal behavior. This baseline is context-aware, considering factors like physical and logical location, application type, time of day, and day of week, across various TCP metrics (duration, data volume, latency, connection failures). The system then automatically identifies any sessions or groups of sessions that deviate from this established normal baseline.
This anomaly detection can find exfiltration, identified by unusual bursts or slow drifts of data, lateral movement with unexpected traffic between network segments or groups that should not be communicating, slowburn DDoS with empty connections opened over time, and network scanners which can serve as an early indication of probing before a DDoS attack.
Digital Forensics
Like aviation’s “black boxes” for understanding past incidents to prevent future occurrences, cPacket’s packet capture capabilities are critical for incident forensics because they provide complete context of network events.
For an effective digital forensics’ solution, cPacket emphasizes pervasive capture, native cloud integration, scalable storage, fast indexing and retrieval, and open API integration.
cPacket’s system can also analyze packet captures from other systems by replaying them through a packet broker port. While a direct file upload UI option is not currently exposed, an API exists for this purpose.
Shortcomings: Augmenting, Not Replacing
It is crucial to reiterate that cPacket’s solutions can augment and strengthen an organization’s security posture, not replace traditional security tools. Specifically:
- cPacket does not replace IDS/IPS or comprehensive signature-matching systems that deal with millions of signatures; instead, it focuses on quick, real-time detection of tens of known IOCs.
- It provides DDoS detection but not mitigation. While it can generate alerts to trigger external scrubbing centers or mitigation systems, cPacket itself does not actively block attacks. Organizations typically keep a human in the loop for mitigation to avoid false positives.
- cPacket does not decrypt encrypted network traffic. Its effectiveness for inspecting encrypted flows depends on the presence of other devices that perform decryption before the traffic reaches cPacket’s monitoring points.
- While cPacket is actively developing AI/LLM-based natural language interaction with network data, this feature is currently in the lab, not in production.
Why This Matters
The convergence of IT and security means that security teams cannot effectively protect what they cannot fully observe, and network performance is meaningless without robust security. The traditional challenges of unmanageable event detection thresholds and the sheer volume of dynamic threats demand a more intelligent approach to network visibility.
cPacket’s network observability solution addresses these challenges by offering pervasive and precise visibility, deterministic and AI-driven incident detection, tamper-proof digital forensics capabilities, and seamless integration with existing security tools through open APIs, augmenting current workflows without requiring a complete overhaul.
For network security teams facing increasing complexity and evolving threats, investigating cPacket’s applicability to their use case means exploring how uncompromising network visibility and intelligent analytics can significantly enhance their ability to detect, respond to, and validate their security posture, ultimately leading to a more resilient and secure enterprise.
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