Lawful? Intercept!

Capturing network traffic is happening everywhere (lawful or by “bad guys”), or at least it seems that way. But how easy is it to capture network packets? What tools do you need, and what pro’s and con’s are there? What about high speed backbones? How can you store that much? And can you detect if someone is capturing your traffic? How can you prevent it? This talk aims to answer those questions.

The German “Vorratsdatenspeicherung” (data retention) is one of those zombie government projects that apparently refuse to die, and many other states and governments would really love to see everything their population does. Some of them already do, and even do that at large scale and high speeds. And there are also bad guys at work, grabbing packets right, left and center to gain insight into the data transported on various networks. But sometimes it’s just the student in the shared apartment network where you wonder if the others are watching your every move, e.g. by leveraging Wireshark or other open source tools. This talk aims at giving you the basics and advanced/pro topics of network captures: the challenges & pitfalls, the devices used by professionals for speeds greater than 1Gbps, and if and how you can detect and protect against someone snooping (or even modifying/injecting) packets.

About the Speaker