cPacket Security Field Day Introduction

cPacket delivers zero-downtime observability for mission-critical networks across finance, healthcare, and government. Trusted with over 50% of global market data, our ASIC+FPGA-powered platform aligns with NIST CSF 2.0 to provide pervasive, scalable visibility across hybrid and cloud environments—enabling real-time packet analytics, rapid threat detection, and enhanced protection for SOC/NOC operations. Founded in 2007 as a semiconductor company specializing in hardware-offloaded string search, cPacket evolved to build a full platform for network observability, initially gaining traction with British Telecom for the London 2012 Olympics. Their core strengths lie in providing nanosecond timestamping, pervasive packet capture, and real-time network analytics across hybrid environments, including private and public clouds, and data centers. Their ideal customers are “zero downtime enterprises” in finance, healthcare, and government that demand packet precision, performance, and the newly added context provided by AI.

cPacket believes that robust network observability solutions can significantly augment and strengthen security postures without replacing existing security tools. Their approach is built on a pervasive, independent, and scalable architecture, allowing them to capture packets anywhere in a hybrid network, from 100 to 400 gigabits per second, and process trillions of packets daily. Crucially, their solutions operate independently of application logs, ensuring visibility even if applications are compromised. The cPacket architecture involves monitoring points (taps, spans, virtual taps) that feed into packet brokers equipped with FPGAs and ASICs on every port. These hardware components enable high-speed packet inspection and counting at the port level, allowing for capabilities like string matching on every packet at speeds up to 1.6 terabits per second.

The solution further includes sophisticated packet capture analytics, capable of writing 200 gigabits per second directly to disk while simultaneously indexing and analyzing packets for session length, duration, and latency. While cPacket does not decrypt data, they extract and analyze a vast amount of metadata from handshakes, DNS calls, ICMP, and other network traffic to gain visibility into network health and potential threats. This collected data and metrics are centralized in C-Clear, where they are enriched, analyzed with AI/machine learning algorithms, and presented through dashboards and workflows, including Grafana and custom APIs. cPacket also offers the ability to push metrics and packets to external object storage for long-term retention or more extensive AI analysis, and is investing in LLM-based interactions for agentic AI, demonstrating their commitment to an open API ecosystem that integrates with security companies, SIEMs, and IT service management platforms.