Building a system that can do full context PCAP for a single machine is trivial, IMHO compared to creating predictive algorithms for analyzing PCAP traffic. There are log data search solutions like Elasticsearch, GreyLog2, ELSA, Splunk and Logstash that can help you archive and dig through the data.
My favorite network traffic big data solution (2012) is PacketPig. In 2014 I noticed another player named packetsled. Cisco’s got a solution opensoc but I can’t seem to find the ML code. I found this nice setup by Alienvault. Security Onion, BRO IDS is a great network security IDS etc distro. I have seen one called xtractr, MR for forensics. Several solutions exist and PCAP files can be fed to the engines for analysis. I think ARGUS and Moloch (PCAP Elasticsearch) have a place here too, but I haven’t tackled it yet. There’s a DNS Hadoop presentation from Endgame clairvoyant-squirrel. There’s also openfpc and streamDB. There are some DNS tools like passivedns. ELSA is another tool.
I started using PCAP to CSV conversion perl program, and written my own sniffer to csv in scapy. Super Timelines are being done in python too. Once I get a PCAP file converted to csv, I load it up to HDFS via HUE. I also found this PCAP visualization blog entry by Raffael Marty.
I’ve stored a bunch of csv network traces and did analysis using HIVE and PIG queries. It was very simple. Name the columns and query each column looking for specific entries. Very labour intensive. Binary analysis on Hadoop.
I’m working on a MapReduce library that uses machine learning to classify attackers and their network patterns. As of 2013, there are a few commercial venders like IBM and RSA which have added Hadoop capability to their SIEM product lines. Here is Twitters logging setup. In 2014 I loaded all the csv attack data into CDH4 cluster with Impala query engine. I’m also looking at writing pandas dataframes to Googles Big Query. As of 2014 there are solutions on hadoop for malware analysis , forensics , DNS data mining. Cisco has released their OpenSOC here http://www.slideshare.net/JamesSirota/cisco-opensoc
The biggest advantage with all these systems will be DATA ENRICHMENT. Feeding and combining data to turn a weak signal into actionable insights.
There are a few examples of PCAP ingestion with open source tools like Hadoop:
First one I found was P3:
The second presentation I found was Wayne Wheelers – SherpaSurfing and https://github.com/sherpasurfing/SHERPASURFING:
The third I found was https://github.com/RIPE-NCC/hadoop-pcap:
The fourth project I found was presented at BlackHatEU 2012 by PacketLoop and https://github.com/packetloop/packetpig:
BigSnarf blog 