Solana partners with European Consortium to develop platform for Encrypted Network Traffic Analysis (ENTA)

Solana Networks Inc, a Canadian leader in cyber security and Artificial Intelligence solutions is pleased to announce its selection by EU-based ITEA and Canada's NRC IRAP as the technical lead to develop the ENTA (Encrypted Network Traffic Analysis) platform.

Solana will lead a multinational consortium of six partners to develop ENTA as a software solution which enables rapid development of AI-based solutions bringing visibility to encrypted network traffic.  Other consortium partners include MTP Metados y Tecnologia of Spain, RUAG AG of Switzerland, BEIA from Austria, C4FF from the United Kingdom and Dalhousie University from Canada. Solana's CTO, Dr Biswajit Nandy will serve as the technical project lead for the consortium.

Adoption of encrypted traffic has grown significantly in recent years. More than 80% of Internet traffic is now encrypted. This is a positive development for end users and organizations, providing them with data privacy. However, for IT security analysts, it is now harder to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. Encrypted traffic poses great challenges for existing cyber security and network management tool chains as the ability to examine traffic content is lost. There is a need for innovative new solutions which retain user privacy and yet can bring visibility to network traffic and strengthen the network security posture.

The ENTA platform will provide a dynamic framework which integrates components required for AI-based network traffic analysis, including flexible deep learning and machine learning pipelines. The platform will support building blocks required for different ML/DL based network traffic analysis. Platform users will be enabled to rapidly develop solutions addressing various use cases which require encrypted network traffic visibility. The project will demonstrate two uses cases developed using the ENTA platform: (i) identification of encrypted applications (ii) discovery of encrypted IoT devices and detection of rogue IoT devices.

Future use cases which can be seamlessly built using the platform include examples such as blockchain detection, TLS analytics and cyber security applications such as detection of data exfiltration over encrypted covert channels.