/sniffnet

Application to comfortably monitor your network traffic

Primary LanguageRustApache License 2.0Apache-2.0

 

Application to comfortably monitor your network traffic
Multithreaded, cross-platform, reliable

Graphical interface translated in:
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Installation

You can install Sniffnet in one of the following ways:

from GitHub releases 

You can install Sniffnet through the installers available in the latest release.
Choose from a Windows installer, a macOS disk image, or a DEB package (depending on your operating system).
Here for your convenience you can find the direct link to the downloads:

from Crates.io 

Follow this method only if you have Rust installed on your machine.
In this case, the application binary can be installed with:

cargo install sniffnet

Required dependencies

Depending on your operating system, you may need to install some dependencies to run Sniffnet:

Windows dependencies 

In order to correctly run Sniffnet on Windows systems you need to:

  • Install Npcap.

  • Download the Npcap SDK.

  • Add the SDK's /Lib or /Lib/x64 folder to your LIB environment variable.

Linux dependencies 

In order to correctly run Sniffnet on Linux systems, install the libraries and header files for the libpcap library:

sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev

Note that if you are not running as root, you need to set capabilities to inspect a network adapter:

sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip <your/Sniffnet/executable/path>

Most Linux system also need this dependency (required to build the library used to play sounds):

sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev

Depending on your Linux environment you may also need libfontconfig:

sudo apt-get install libfontconfig libfontconfig1-dev
MacOS dependencies 

MacOS natively has all the dependencies you need to build and run Sniffnet!

Features

  • 💻 choose a network adapter of your PC to inspect
  • 🏷️ select a set of filters to apply to the observed traffic
  • 📖 view overall statistics about your Internet traffic
  • 📈 view real-time charts about traffic intensity (bytes and packets per second, incoming and outgoing)
  • 🔉 set custom notifications to inform you when defined network events occur (data rate exceeded a specified threshold, or new data have been exchanged from your favorite connections)
  • ⭐ view most relevant connections in real time (most recent, most packets, most bytes, favorites)
  • 🌍 get information about the country of the remote network addresses (IP Geolocation)
  • 🎨 choose the style that fits you the most from 4 different available themes
  • 📁 save complete textual report with detailed information for each connection:
    • source and destination IP addresses
    • source and destination ports
    • carried protocols
    • amount of exchanged packets and bytes
    • initial and final timestamp of information exchange
  • ... and more!

IP Geolocation

See details

Geolocation refers to the remote IP address of the connection, and it's performed against a MMDB file:

The MMDB (MaxMind database) format has been developed especially for IP lookup.
It is optimized to perform lookups on data indexed by IP network ranges quickly and efficiently.
It permits the best performance on IP lookups, and it's suitable for use in a production environment.

This product includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from https://www.maxmind.com

This format potentially allows Sniffnet to execute different hundreds of IP lookups in a matter of a few milliseconds.

Sometimes it is not possible to determine the location of an IP address (in this case the country will be marked as ?); this is most likely due to the address being a private IP address.

Supported application layer protocols

See details

Application layer protocols are inferred from the transport port numbers, following the convention maintained by IANA.

Please, remember that this is just a convention:

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for maintaining the official assignments of port numbers for specific uses.
However, many unofficial uses of well-known port numbers occur in practice.

The following table reports the port-to-service mappings used by Sniffnet, chosen from the most common assignments by IANA.

Port number(s) Application protocol Description
20, 21 FTP File Transfer Protocol
22 SSH Secure Shell
23 Telnet Telnet
25 SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
49 TACACS Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System
53 DNS Domain Name System
67, 68 DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
69 TFTP Trivial File Transfer Protocol
80, 8080 HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol
109, 110 POP Post Office Protocol
123 NTP Network Time Protocol
137, 138, 139 NetBIOS NetBIOS
143, 220 IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol
161, 162, 199 SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol
179 BGP Border Gateway Protocol
389 LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
443 HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol over SSL/TLS
636 LDAPS Lightweight Directory Access Protocol over TLS/SSL
989, 990 FTPS File Transfer Protocol over TLS/SSL
993 IMAPS Internet Message Access Protocol over TLS/SSL
995 POP3S Post Office Protocol 3 over TLS/SSL
1900 SSDP Simple Service Discovery Protocol
5222 XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
5353 mDNS Multicast DNS

Keyboard shortcuts

See details

Some keyboard shortcuts are available to improve the efficiency of use and the overall user experience.

If you want to suggest a different key combination for one of the existing shortcuts or if you want to propose a new shortcut, give a look at this issue.

The currently usable hotkeys are reported in the following:

Event Shortcut keys
Quit the application ctrl+Q (cmd+Q on macOS)
Open full report ctrl+O (cmd+O on macOS)
Open settings ctrl+, (cmd+, on macOS)
Clear all notifications ctrl+D (cmd+D on macOS)
Start the analysis and confirm modal actions enter
Interrupt the ongoing analysis backspace
Close settings and modal popups esc
Switch from a tab to the next (or previous) one tab (or shift+tab)

Troubleshooting

See details

Missing dependencies

Most of the errors that can occur are likely due to your system missing required pcap dependencies, necessary to correctly analyze a network adapter.
Check the required dependencies section for instructions on how to proceed.

For a Windows reference, you can check issue #1.

Note that most Linux system also need this dependency (required to build the library used to play sounds):

sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev

Some Linux systems also need libfontconfig, see issue #18 for a reference.

Installers incompatibilities

If you have problems after having installed Sniffnet through the provided installers, it could be due to your OS not being compatible with the pre-built binaries I generated for you.
Reach me out, and I'll try to generate an installer for your specific operating system.

Rendering problems

In some cases, especially if you are running on an old architecture, the wgpu default renderer used by iced may cause some problems that could prevent you from running Sniffnet.
In this case, you can try building the application from the glow-renderer branch, which uses the glow renderer.

In any case don't hesitate to open an issue, and I will do my best to help you!

Acknowledgements

  • A special mention goes to Tiansheng Li for being my first sponsor ever!

  • A big shout-out to all the contributors of Sniffnet!

  • The graphical user interface has been realized with iced, a cross-platform GUI library for Rust focused on simplicity and type-safety

  • Last but not least, thanks to every single stargazer: all forms of support made it possible to keep improving Sniffnet!