Laboratory of Network Traffic Monitoring

Network traffic monitoring laboratory at Faculty of Information Technology CTU in Prague was established based on many years cooperation with the operator of the Czech national academic network - CESNET association. The primary goals of the laboratory are research and development in the area of monitoring of computer network traffic and traffic of IoT (Internet of Things) infrastructures, network traffic analysis and anomaly detection, i.e., detection of malicious or suspicious traffic.

Our activities are focused on data processing at various levels. We use our developed software tools, hardware acceleration (using FPGA technology and COMBO cards), and automatic generation of network devices (or their parts) that process network traffic and that are described in a modern high-level application specific language called P4.

The lab has a long term collaboration with students of both bachelor and master study degrees and it provides them work environment and interesting topics aiming practical deployment of the developed technology (not only) in the national academic communication infrastructure.

What we are working on

In the cooperation with CESNET association and several Czech universities, we are working on many tools and technologies for 1) network traffic monitoring, 2) traffic analysis, 3) detection of security events, 4) automatic passive recognition of traffic, services, devices. The following simplified figure shows the overview for a rough idea:

Developed Tools and Technologies

Research Activities

Since 2013, we have worked on one-year projects specified in Research contracts between FIT CTU in Prague and CESNET association.

Since 2017 we have a three-year support by internal grant of CTU in Prague (SGS). This project aims on research and development in the area of tools for monitoring and detection of security threats in the network traffic.

In the last years, we have successfully published and presented some of our results at several international scientific conferences.

List of Publications

Educational Activities

Teaching support for the courses:

Currently:

  • Hardwarově akcelerované monitorování síťového provozu - Hardware accelerated network traffic monitoring (BI-HAM)
  • Počítačové Sítě - Computer Networks (BI-PSI)

In the past:

  • Síťová Bezpečnost - Network Security (MI-SIB)

Defended Bachelor and Master Theses of our team:

The list of theses

Team and Contacts

Leaders

  • Ing. Tomáš Čejka, Ph.D. (tomas.cejka@fit.cvut.cz) (laboratory founder)

  • prof. Ing. Hana Kubátová, CSc.

PostDoc Researchers

  • Ing. Karel Hynek, Ph.D.

Developers

  • Ing. Pavel Šiška

Ph.D. students

  • Ing. Tomáš Beneš

  • Ing. Matej Hulák

  • Ing. Josef Koumar

  • Ing. Jan Luxemburk

  • Ing. Jaroslav Pesek

  • Ing. Dominik Soukup

  • Ing. Daniel Uhříček

Students

  • Damir Zainullin

  • Ondřej Hrdlička

  • Bc. Lukáš Jančička

  • Bc. David Kežlínek

  • Bc. Andrej Lukačovič

  • Karel Mudruňka

  • Bc. Richard Plný

  • Pavel Valach