Decapsulation ERSPAN Traffic With Open Source Tools
Cisco Encapsulated Remote SPAN (ERSPAN) feature allows to monitor traffic on one or more ports and send the monitored traffic to one or more destination ports. Traffic is encapsulated into GRE tunnel and routed via network to ERSPAN destination. Any device that supports ERSPAN can be used as ERSPAN destination. It might be another Cisco device or Linux with installed software that can decapsulate GRE traffic.
The goal of this article is to show methods and tools for decapsulation of ERSPAN traffic. For this purpose I have built simple lab that consists of a Cisco CSR 1000v router and two Linux boxes. Core Linux represents a network host and generates network traffic (ICMP) that is going to be monitored. It is connected to the port GigabitEthernet1 of the Cisco router. The router is configured to monitor traffic on the port Gi1 and it sends traffic encapsulated in GRE tunneling protocol to IP address 10.230.10.1. It is the IP address of the ERSPAN destination configured on Linux Security Union. Security Onion is a unique Linux distro for intrusion detection, network security monitoring, and log management based on Ubuntu however any other Linux distro can be used.
Picture 1 - ERSPAN Lab Topology
Below is an example of ERSPAN Continue reading

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