Network Analyzers

netsniff-ng – Swiss army knife for network plumbing

netsniff-ng is a performant network analyzer and networking toolkit. It’s described as the Swiss army knife for network packets.

The gain of performance is reached by built-in zero-copy mechanisms, so that on packet reception and transmission the kernel does not need to copy packets from kernel space to user space, and vice versa.

The netsniff-ng toolkit’s primary usage goal is to facilitate a network developer’s / hacker’s daily Linux plumbing. It can be used for network development, debugging, analysis, auditing or network reconnaissance.

The netsniff-ng toolkit consists of the following utilities:

  • netsniff-ng, a fast zero-copy analyzer, pcap capturing and replaying tool.
    • Fast network analyzer based on packet mmap mechanisms.
    • Record pcap files to disc, replay them and also do an offline and online analysis.
    • Capturing, analysis or replay of raw 802.11 frames are supported as well.
    • pcap files are also compatible with tcpdump or Wireshark traces.
    • Processes those pcap traces either in scatter-gather I/O or by mmap I/O.
  • trafgen, a multithreaded low-level zero-copy network packet generator.
  • mausezahn, high-level packet generator for HW/SW appliances with Cisco-CLI.
  • bpfc, a Berkeley Packet Filter compiler, Linux BPF JIT disassembler.
  • ifpps, a top-like kernel networking statistics tool.
  • flowtop, a top-like netfilter connection tracking tool.
  • curvetun, a lightweight curve25519-based IP tunnel.
  • astraceroute, an autonomous system (AS) trace route utility.

Website: netsniff-ng.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: netsniff-ng developers
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

netsniff-ng is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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