Encryption is the backbone of online privacy and secure communications, but it poses a serious challenge for networking and cybersecurity solution vendors. While it keeps our data safe, it also creates blind spots that cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting: more than 87% of threats are currently delivered through encrypted channels. Beyond security, encryption is also a problem for network management that needs to identify flows to carry out functions such as policy control, traffic steering and routing. While decryption can sometimes be used to preserve visibility, in many contexts, it is neither permissible nor desirable. But that doesn’t mean one has to orchestrate traffic or defend against cyberattacks blindfolded.

The Good News: Visibility Without Decryption

The good news is that it’s possible to identify and classify encrypted traffic without decrypting it. By embedding specialized traffic intelligence software into your network or security solutions, you can regain essential visibility while maintaining performance and preserving privacy. This enables you to support critical functions such as:

• Application-aware traffic filtering and classification
•  Policy-based traffic steering
• Load balancing, network slicing and network segmentation
•  Real-time threat detection
• Detection of anomalous and evasive traffic

Enea Qosmos: Leading the Way in Encrypted Traffic Classification

At Enea, we specialize in embedded network traffic visibility. Our Qosmos Encrypted Traffic Classification (ETC) technology is the answer for security and networking vendors seeking visibility without compromising speed or privacy.

Built on a foundation of deep packet inspection (DPI) and enhanced by advanced analytics and machine learning (ML), Qosmos ETC enables accurate encrypted traffic identification and classification. And thanks to our First Packet Advantage, most application flows can even be identified right from the first packet—enabling real-time decision-making.

Smart Techniques for Smarter Traffic Intelligence

Qosmos ETC ensures the highest levels of accuracy and precision through a multi-layered approach to traffic classification that includes techniques such as:

• Handshake analysis
• Binary pattern analysis
• Statistical and behavioral analysis
• DNS cache analysis

When faced with encrypted protocols like TLS 1.3 or scenarios where traditional data points are obscured, ML models are used in combination with the above techniques to identify and classify the flows.

ETC also excels at detecting malicious, evasive and anomalous traffic — including VPNs, anonymizers, domain fronting, P2P misuse, and more. Our detection techniques include:

• Session correlation and deep file inspection
• DGA (Domain Generation Algorithm) detection
• Protocol anomaly indicators
• Cryptocurrency-related activity analysis
• Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) detection

Trusted by Industry Leaders

Enea’s Qosmos products are the most widely deployed commercial network traffic classification and threat detection engines on the market. With unmatched protocol and application coverage, they deliver in-depth visibility that is:

•  Accurate: Advanced DPI uses telemetry data for precision in traffic identification.
•  Comprehensive: Qosmos technologies provide classification data for 4700+ protocols (including IoT/SCADA & Cloud/SaaS) and delivers 5900+ metadata.
• Relevant: Precise, contextual data is delivered via a framework that enables you to select the features most relevant to your analytical or operational needs.
•  Real-time: Raw data is captured on-the-fly via passive physical or virtual network TAPs that do not affect traffic flow.
•  Always Up to Date: Updates are continuous and hot-swappable to ensure you will always stay abreast of constantly changing applications and protocols, and benefit from the latest advancements in data classification, especially for encrypted and evasive traffic.

If you want to remove the encryption blind spots in your solution’s network visibility, find out more here.

If you would like to see a demonstration of our technology, contact us here.