Team Hercules — The battle for securing the network begins!
By: Christopher Barron
Tags: Projects, Network Analysis, Raspberry Pi

Source: NetworkRadius.com

We, the Hercules team are Marie, Christopher, Michael and Pom working on network traffic analysis and logging, for enhancing network security and also incorporate Raspberry Pi into it. By logging the traffic, we are working to convert the information into a csv file and email the user on how their network is being used. We will use a variety of tools like Wireshark, Scapy, Tshark along with Pandas for programming.

Project Area

The main abstract for our group is to collect data from a network and be able to analyze it using a program that we have begun to create. In the end, we plan on expanding our program to be able to identify unwanted data and filtering it out from our traffic.

Research done during the week

Some of the problems in network security are the vulnerabilities that are present. Malicious actors tend to exploit several things in a network, including but not limited to: unsecured wireless networks, unpatched software and hardware, unsecured websites, unwanted applications, and more. It is possible to lose sensitive information with these weaknesses. Something that we can work to develop a program that can monitor network traffic to detect patterns of malicious intents. As of now, there is not that many user friendly options that allow for easy network monitoring.

Initial programming project and plans for next week

For our programming project, we have divided among ourselves into two teams that focuses on two key parts: IP/DNS scanning, and Packet/Port scanning. In summary, we have created a program to get data from a public network. We are using Scapy to collect data since we can have data in real time without using WireShark. In addition, we are working on having some more features in the code to analyze data, and add on to the program that will get the statistics of a network traffic. We are also reaching out to industry professionals by email to gather outside resources, where we can get more information about tools and how to approach to solve network security issue in specific area. We have also set up the Raspberry Pi and is ready to be implemented in the project.

On the IP/DNS scanning side, we have made a simple program that collects data on the fly and then prints out information after it has been parsed. One of the major problems with the script is that it is not properly setup to work in a unix environment. Currently, you would have to manually edit the file in order to change certain settings instead of being able to enter in some commands through unix; it’s simply not designed to do that yet. In the next week, we will be implementing the ability to run the program and modify certain values through unix. This will be important because the Raspberry Pi setup is done all through a unix environment.

On the Packet/Port scanning part of the project, we have written a couple of functions that analyze network data from Wireshark. The first function determines biggest, smallest and average size of the package. The second function analyzes protocols. It finds out the number of times every protocol was used. The third function invokes Wireshark, capture data and save it to the file.

CITATIONS:

Alterson, Gary. “Security: Is It Mission Impossible?” Blogs@Cisco — Cisco Blogs, Cisco, 20 July 2018, blogs.cisco.com/services/security-is-it-mission-impossible.

Berry, Megan. Network Security: Top 5 Fundamentals. IT Manager Daily, 16 Apr. 2012, www.itmanagerdaily.com/network-security-fundamentals/.

Chou, Eric. “Network Automation Nerds.” Fun with Scapy, Pythonicneteng, 31 Dec. 2012, blog.pythonicneteng.com/2012/12/fun-with-scapy.html.

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