Analyzing network traffic allows to study and appreciate the details of the functioning of the underlying layer. If you are wondering how to analyze network traffic then this project is for you. This repository contains the source code of a network traffic analyzer written in C++.

This project is based on libpcap so you have to install libpcap-dev package on your Linux distribution:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev -y

To compile the project I suggest you to use CMake. These commands can be used to compile your source code using CMake:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make -j $(getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN)

That is all! After that you can execute your sniffer as following:

sudo ./sniffer

First you have to select the interface to use for your sniffing session. The list of all interfaces that are present in your system will be displayed when your sniffer will be launched as well.

The information reported on the screen by the tool are structures as following:

timestamp MAC_src -> MAC_dst IP_src -> IP_dst Protocol PORT_src -> PORT_dst

If the packet is contains an HTTP request (e.g., a POST / GET command) the URL present in the packet is extracted and then displayed to the user.

In this example the output of the tool is shown. In particular, each line displayed in your terminal represent one single packet that is processed by the tool.