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.
Related Software
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|---|---|
| Wireshark | Network protocol analyzer with a rich and powerful feature set |
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| Kyanos | Networking analysis tool using eBPF |
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| ngrep | grep applied to the network layer |
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| sniffit | CORBA based sniffer system with ncurses interactive mode |
| Jomon | Network forensics and sniffer tool |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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