Ipoque Deep Packet Inspection Engine Goes Open Source

Ipoque, the European vendor of Internet traffic management solutions, reportedly published its DPI engine as open source software.

 

OpenDPI is derived from the commercial PACE product, which is ipoque's traffic classification engine used in its carrier-grade DPI and bandwidth management solutions. 

The core of OpenDPI is a software library designed to classify Internet traffic according to application protocols. The software can be used and contributed to it under the conditions of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

 

Internet service providers often struggle with a disproportionately high bandwidth usage by a relatively small portion of their subscribers. This disparity is caused by high-bandwidth applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing, video streaming and large file downloads from file hosting service.

 

"The idea behind OpenDPI is to encourage knowledge exchange between all interested parties,” said Hendrik Schulze, chief technology officer ipoque who is responsible for the OpenDPI project, in a statement. “We value any feedback from the open source community and everyone else. In the end, we hope that we can return something back to the community."

 

"The continuing development of OpenDPI is a public process. Transparency was important for us from the beginning,” Klaus Mochalski, CEO of ipoque, said in a statement. “The lack of transparency from the vendors' side has become a widespread problem in the DPI industry. We believe in transparency and that is why we decided to push this project."

 

DPI has been often debated about network neutrality and online privacy impacting negatively the reputation of DPI-based systems. Lack of transparency from the vendors' side makes Internet users afraid of this technology. Many myths about what DPI can do, including reading and analyzing the content of user communication, are being debunked.

 

With access to parts of our DPI engine, the company wants to demonstrate that many of the alleged privacy violations simply do not happen in DPI bandwidth management systems.