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Packet crafting is a technique that allows network administrators to probe firewall rule-sets and find entry points into a targeted system or network. This is done by manually generating packets to test network devices and behaviour, instead of using existing network traffic. [1] Testing may target the firewall, IDS, TCP/IP stack, router or any other component of the network. [1] [2] Packets are usually created by using a packet generator or packet analyzer which allows for specific options and flags to be set on the created packets. The act of packet crafting can be broken into four stages: Packet Assembly, Packet Editing, Packet Play and Packet Decoding. [1] [2] Tools exist for each of the stages - some tools are focused only on one stage while others such as Ostinato try to encompass all stages.
Packet Assembly is the creation of the packets to be sent. Some popular programs used for packet assembly are Hping, Nemesis, Ostinato, Cat Karat packet builder, Libcrafter, libtins, PcapPlusPlus, Scapy, Wirefloss and Yersinia. [1] [2] [3] Packets may be of any protocol and are designed to test specific rules or situations. For example, a TCP packet may be created with a set of erroneous flags to ensure that the target machine sends a RESET command or that the firewall blocks any response. [1] [2]
Packet Editing is the modification of created or captured packets. This involves modifying packets in manners which are difficult or impossible to do in the Packet Assembly stage, such as modifying the payload of a packet. [2] Programs such as Scapy, Ostinato, Netdude allow a user to modify recorded packets' fields, checksums and payloads quite easily. [1] These modified packets can be saved in packet streams which may be stored in pcap files to be replayed later.
Packet Play or Packet Replay is the act of sending a pre-generated or captured series of packets. Packets may come from Packet Assembly and Editing or from captured network attacks. This allows for testing of a given usage or attack scenario for the targeted network. Tcpreplay is the most common program for this task since it is capable of taking a stored packet stream in the pcap format and sending those packets at the original rate or a user-defined rate. Scapy also supports send functions to replay any saved packets/pcap. Ostinato added support for pcap files in version 0.4. [4] Some packet analyzers are also capable of packet replay.
Packet Decoding is the capture and analysis of the network traffic generated during Packet Play. In order to determine the targeted network's response to the scenario created by Packet Play, the response must be captured by a packet analyzer and decoded according to the appropriate specifications. Depending on the packets sent, a desired response may be no packets were returned or that a connection was successfully established, among others. The most famous tools for that task are Wireshark and Scapy.
In computer networking, IP address spoofing or IP spoofing is the creation of Internet Protocol (IP) packets with a false source IP address, for the purpose of impersonating another computing system.
A packet analyzer is a computer program or computer hardware such as a packet capture appliance that can analyze and log traffic that passes over a computer network or part of a network. Packet capture is the process of intercepting and logging traffic. As data streams flow across the network, the analyzer captures each packet and, if needed, decodes the packet's raw data, showing the values of various fields in the packet, and analyzes its content according to the appropriate RFC or other specifications.
tcpdump is a data-network packet analyzer computer program that runs under a command line interface. It allows the user to display TCP/IP and other packets being transmitted or received over a network to which the computer is attached. Distributed under the BSD license, tcpdump is free software.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.
A port scanner is an application designed to probe a server or host for open ports. Such an application may be used by administrators to verify security policies of their networks and by attackers to identify network services running on a host and exploit vulnerabilities.
In computer networking, port knocking is a method of externally opening ports on a firewall by generating a connection attempt on a set of prespecified closed ports. Once a correct sequence of connection attempts is received, the firewall rules are dynamically modified to allow the host which sent the connection attempts to connect over specific port(s). A variant called single packet authorization (SPA) exists, where only a single "knock" is needed, consisting of an encrypted packet.
hping is an open-source packet generator and analyzer for the TCP/IP protocol created by Salvatore Sanfilippo . It is one of the common tools used for security auditing and testing of firewalls and networks, and was used to exploit the idle scan scanning technique, and now implemented in the Nmap Security Scanner. The new version of hping, hping3, is scriptable using the Tcl language and implements an engine for string based, human-readable description of TCP/IP packets so that the programmer can write scripts related to low level TCP/IP packet manipulation and analysis in a short time.
In the field of computer network administration, pcap is an application programming interface (API) for capturing network traffic. While the name is an abbreviation of packet capture, that is not the API's proper name. Unix-like systems implement pcap in the libpcap library; for Windows, there is a port of libpcap named WinPcap that is no longer supported or developed, and a port named Npcap for Windows 7 and later that is still supported.
Intrusion detection system evasion techniques are modifications made to attacks in order to prevent detection by an intrusion detection system (IDS). Almost all published evasion techniques modify network attacks. The 1998 paper Insertion, Evasion, and Denial of Service: Eluding Network Intrusion Detection popularized IDS evasion, and discussed both evasion techniques and areas where the correct interpretation was ambiguous depending on the targeted computer system. The 'fragroute' and 'fragrouter' programs implement evasion techniques discussed in the paper. Many web vulnerability scanners, such as 'Nikto', 'whisker' and 'Sandcat', also incorporate IDS evasion techniques.
Packet injection in computer networking, is the process of interfering with an established network connection by means of constructing packets to appear as if they are part of the normal communication stream. The packet injection process allows an unknown third party to disrupt or intercept packets from the consenting parties that are communicating, which can lead to degradation or blockage of users' ability to utilize certain network services or protocols. Packet injection is commonly used in man-in-the-middle attacks and denial-of-service attacks.
Mausezahn is a fast network traffic generator written in C which allows the user to craft nearly every possible and "impossible" packet. Since version 0.31 Mausezahn is open source in terms of the GPLv2. Herbert Haas, the original developer of Mausezahn, died on 25 June 2011. The project has been incorporated into the netsniff-ng toolkit, and continues to be developed there.
Bit-Twist is a libpcap-based packet generator and packet capture file modifier and replayer. It complements tcpdump, a packet capturing tool also built upon the packet capturing engine libpcap. Bit-Twist allows you to regenerate packets from one or more pcap files. It also comes with a comprehensive pcap file editor to allow advance manipulation of packet information, e.g. fields in Ethernet, ARP, IP, ICMP, TCP, and UDP headers, prior to regenerating the packets onto the network.
ngrep is a network packet analyzer written by Jordan Ritter. It has a command-line interface, and relies upon the pcap library and the GNU regex library.
Justniffer is a TCP packet sniffer. It can log network traffic in a 'standard' or in a customized way. It can also log response times, useful for tracking network services performances . The output format of the traffic can be easily customized. An example written in Python stores the transferred contents in an output directory separated by domains. This means that the transferred files like html, css, javascript, images, sounds, etc. can be saved to a directory.
netsniff-ng is a free Linux network analyzer and networking toolkit originally written by Daniel Borkmann. Its gain of performance is reached by zero-copy mechanisms for network packets, so that the Linux kernel does not need to copy packets from kernel space to user space via system calls such as recvmsg
. libpcap, starting with release 1.0.0, also supports the zero-copy mechanism on Linux for capturing (RX_RING), so programs using libpcap also use that mechanism on Linux.
CommView is an application for network monitoring, packet analysis, and decoding. There are two editions of CommView: the standard edition for Ethernet networks and the wireless edition for 802.11 networks named CommView for WiFi. The application runs on Microsoft Windows. It is developed by TamoSoft, a privately held New Zealand company founded in 1998.
Xplico is a network forensics analysis tool (NFAT), which is a software that reconstructs the contents of acquisitions performed with a packet sniffer.
Packet Sender is an open source utility to allow sending and receiving TCP and UDP packets. It also supports TCP connections using SSL, intense traffic generation, HTTP(S) GET/POST requests, and panel generation. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is licensed GNU General Public License v2 and is free software. Packet Sender's web site says "It's designed to be very easy to use while still providing enough features for power users to do what they need.".
Wire data or wire image is the information that passes over computer and telecommunication networks defining communications between client and server devices. It is the result of decoding wire and transport protocols containing the bi-directional data payload. More precisely, wire data is the information that is communicated in each layer of the OSI model.
PCAP-over-IP is a method for transmitting captured network traffic through a TCP connection. The captured network traffic is transferred over TCP as a PCAP file in order to preserve relevant metadata about the packets, such as timestamps.