sniffnet 1.2.0

Application to comfortably monitor your network traffic
sniffnet-1.2.0 is not a library.

Graphical interface translated in: 🇬🇧  🇩🇪  🇬🇷  🇪🇦  🇮🇷  🇫🇷  🇮🇹  🇰🇷  🇵🇱  🇵🇹  🇷🇴  🇷🇺  🇹🇷  🇺🇦  🇨🇳

Help fund Sniffnet's Development 💖

Sniffnet is a fully free, open-source software which needs your support to be maintained on a regular basis.

If you appreciate Sniffnet, please consider donating: this is the only way for me to keep working on this project, constantly improving and expanding it.

A special mention goes to these awesome organizations and folks who are sponsoring Sniffnet:

Installation

You can install Sniffnet in one of the following ways:

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:

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

You can install Sniffnet Homebrew package with:

brew install sniffnet

Required dependencies

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

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.

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 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)
  • 🌐 get details about domain names and network providers of the hosts you are exchanging traffic with
  • 🏠 identify connections in your local network
  • 🌍 get information about the country of the remote hosts (IP geolocation)
  • ⭐ save your favorite network hosts
  • 🔉 set custom notifications to inform you when defined network events occur
  • 🎨 choose the style that fits you the most from 4 different available themes
  • 🕵️ inspect each of your network connections in real time
  • 📁 save complete textual report with detailed information for each network 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 and network providers (ASN)

Geolocation and network providers (ASN) refer to the remote IP address of each connection, and they are retrieved performing lookups against MMDB files:

Note

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

Supported application layer protocols

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

Please, remember that this is just a convention:

Warning

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

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.

Note

On macOS, use the cmd key instead of ctrl

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

Troubleshooting

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 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!