See also
- Packet crafting
- Packet analyzer
- Packetsquare
 | This network-related software article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
A packet generator or packet builder is a type of software that generates random packets or allows the user to construct detailed custom packets. Depending on the network medium and operating system, packet generators utilize raw sockets, NDIS function calls, or direct access to the network adapter kernel-mode driver.
This is useful for testing implementations of IP stacks for bugs and security vulnerabilities.
| Title | Author | OS | Interface | Link | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AnetTest | Anton Titov | Windows, Unix | CLI | AnetTest | GPL |
| Bit-Twist | Addy Yeow | Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X | Bit-Twist | GPLv2 | |
| Cat Karat packet builder | Valery Diomin, Yakov Tetruashvili | Windows | GUI | Cat Karat packet builder | Packet Builder License [1] |
| Colasoft Packet Builder | Colasoft | Colasoft Packet Builder | Packet Builder License: Freeware | ||
| CommView Packet Generator | TamoSoft | For Ethernet For Wi-Fi | Proprietary EULA | ||
| IP Sorcery | Josiah Zayner | Unix | CLI and GUI | IP Sorcery | GPL |
| Nemesis | Jeff Nathan | Windows, Unix | CLI | Nemesis | BSD |
| Ostinato | Srivats P | Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X | GUI and API | GPLv3 | |
| Packet Construction Set | George Neville-Neil | Linux, BSD, Mac OS X | CLI | PCS | BSD-like |
| Packet Sender | Dan Nagle | Windows, Linux, Mac OS X | CLI and GUI | Packet Sender | GPLv2 |
| Pktgen | Linux Foundation | Linux | CLI | Pktgen | |
| packETH | Miha Jemec | GUI and CLI | packETH | GPLv3 | |
| pierf | Pieter Blommaert | Windows(Cygwin)/Linux | CLI | pierf | free BSD |
| rain | Michael Behan | Linux, *BSD | rain | free GPLv2 | |
| Scapy | Philippe BIONDI | Linux/Unix/Windows | Scapy | GPLv2 | |
| targa3 | Mixter | Linux, Unix | targa3 | ? | |
| UMPA | Adriano Monteiro Marques | Cross-platform (Python) | ? | UMPA | GPLv2 |
| trafgen | Daniel Borkmann | Linux | CLI | netsniff-ng | |
| xcap | cxxxap | Windows | GUI | xcap | Free |
| Simple Packet Sender (SPS) | h0h1r4um | Linux | SPS | GPLv3 | |
| WARP17 | Juniper Networks | CLI and API | WARP17 | BSD | |
| Wirefloss | Wirefloss | Web page | GUI | Wirefloss | Free |
| | This network-related software article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
In digital radio, packet radio is the application of packet switching techniques to digital radio communications. Packet radio uses a packet switching protocol as opposed to circuit switching or message switching protocols to transmit digital data via a radio communication link.
In telecommunications and computer networking, a network packet is a formatted unit of data carried by a packet-switched network. A packet consists of control information and user data; the latter is also known as the payload. Control information provides data for delivering the payload. Typically, control information is found in packet headers and trailers.
Network address translation (NAT) is a method of mapping an IP address space into another by modifying network address information in the IP header of packets while they are in transit across a traffic routing device. The technique was originally used to bypass the need to assign a new address to every host when a network was moved, or when the upstream Internet service provider was replaced, but could not route the network's address space. It has become a popular and essential tool in conserving global address space in the face of IPv4 address exhaustion. One Internet-routable IP address of a NAT gateway can be used for an entire private network.
OSCAR is AOL's proprietary instant messaging and presence information protocol. It was used by AOL's AIM instant messaging system and ICQ.
iptables is a user-space utility program that allows a system administrator to configure the IP packet filter rules of the Linux kernel firewall, implemented as different Netfilter modules. The filters are organized in different tables, which contain chains of rules for how to treat network traffic packets. Different kernel modules and programs are currently used for different protocols; iptables applies to IPv4, ip6tables to IPv6, arptables to ARP, and ebtables to Ethernet frames.
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.
A traffic generation model is a stochastic model of the traffic flows or data sources in a communication network, for example a cellular network or a computer network. A packet generation model is a traffic generation model of the packet flows or data sources in a packet-switched network. For example, a web traffic model is a model of the data that is sent or received by a user's web-browser. These models are useful during the development of telecommunication technologies, in view to analyse the performance and capacity of various protocols, algorithms and network topologies.
Network emulation is a technique for testing the performance of real applications over a virtual network. This is different from network simulation where virtual models of traffic, network models, channels, and protocols are applied. The aim is to assess performance, predict the impact of change, or otherwise optimize technology decision-making.
In the context of computer networking, a tunnel broker is a service which provides a network tunnel. These tunnels can provide encapsulated connectivity over existing infrastructure to another infrastructure.
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.
The Common Image Generator Interface (CIGI), is an on-the-wire data protocol that allows communication between an Image Generator and its host simulation. The interface is designed to promote a standard way for a host device to communicate with an image generator (IG) within the industry.
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. Testing may target the firewall, IDS, TCP/IP stack, router or any other component of the network. 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. 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.
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.
New API is an interface to use interrupt mitigation techniques for networking devices in the Linux kernel. Such an approach is intended to reduce the overhead of packet receiving. The idea is to defer incoming message handling until there is a sufficient amount of them so that it is worth handling them all at once.
A greedy source is a traffic generator in a communication network that generates data at the maximum rate possible and at the earliest opportunity possible. Each source always has data to transmit, and is never in idle state due to congestion avoidance or other local host traffic shaping. One new data-packet is generated when the transmission of previous packet is completed, meaning that the sender side queue is never congested. A greedy session is a time-limited packet flow or data stream at maximum possible rate.
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.
NimbleX is a small Slackware-based Linux distribution optimized to run from a CD, USB drive or a network environment. NimbleX has been praised for how fast it boots, as well as for its small disk footprint, which is considered surprising for a distribution using KDE as desktop environment. NimbleX was also remarked for its website that allows users to generate custom bootable images by using a web browser. It was also covered in mainstream Romanian press as the first Linux distribution put together by a Romanian.
NPF is a BSD licensed stateful packet filter, a central piece of software for firewalling. It is comparable to iptables, ipfw, ipfilter and PF. NPF is developed on NetBSD.
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.
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.".