[Bro] Bro vs NetFlow

Seth Hall seth at icir.org
Mon Oct 7 13:48:29 PDT 2013


On Oct 5, 2013, at 11:54 AM, Alec Waters <Alec.Waters at dataline.co.uk> wrote:

> Each has its pros and cons of course, but from my point of view NetFlow is a “truer” picture of flow activity because it’s a 100% layer3 export – things like malformed TCP streams sometimes won’t get logged by apps that take a layer4-or-higher view of the world.

That's not exactly true.  Netflow is unidirectional layer-4 (except for newer bidirectional ipfix extensions).

> It’s also unidirectional – apps that that mung the A->B traffic together with the B->A traffic occasionally suffer from ambiguity of client/server identity, which makes report writing hard.

I've thought about this for a long time and I think the conclusion that I reached is that all you are doing in that model is placing the analysis and understanding of the connections onto analysts.  When I did a lot of Netflow analysis I was constantly working to figure out the flows that matched in each direction.  The only difference in Bro is that it's doing that combining for you which would seem to make sense to me since a lot of people aren't aware of the crazy complexity you can have in trying to interpret netflow.  

Granted, Bro (and all other packet sniffers) will be wrong sometimes but you will have typically have confusing netflow in those cases of failure too.

> Finally, NetFlow can be configured to prematurely export long-lived flows meaning that you can see how many bytes were transferred at different points in the flow, rather than just knowing that X bytes were transferred in total.

You could do this in Bro too.  It would be pretty easy to write a Bro script to do a netflow-style log for connections every X minutes.  I just chose to avoid this model in Bro by default because of the number of times broken flows tripped me up in the past.

>  In my experience, having a two or more tools doing the “same” job in different ways isn’t the galactic waste it may appear to be J

After all of my curmudgeonly grumbling, I totally agree with this. :)

  .Seth

--
Seth Hall
International Computer Science Institute
(Bro) because everyone has a network
http://www.bro.org/

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