The Sniffer's Guide to Raw Traffic
Front matter: This is a slightly modified and extended version of my older pcap tutorial. Revisiting this work five years later, I am necessarily dumber (age and beer) yet hopefully somewhat more knowledgeable. Contact information has changed, please send your hate-mail to casado at cs.stanford.edu.
Who this is for: This tutorial assumes a cursory
knowledge in networks; what a packet is, Ethernet vs. IP vs.
TCP vs. UDP etc. If these concepts are foreign I highly suggest
you invest in a good (e.g. probably can't find at Best Buy)
networking book. My favorites are:
Intro: Finally, you've made it (either by reading, skimming or skipping) to the start of the tutorial. We'll start at the verryyy begining and define a few thing before getting into the nity-grity -- howver if you are eager to get moving, scroll to the bottom of this page, cut, paste, compile and enjoy. For the rest of you, the following two definition may give you a clue about what we are doing, what the tools we will be using.
Getting Started
Well there is an awful lot to cover.. so lets just get familiar with
libpcap. All the examples in this tutorial assume that you are
sitting on an Ethernet. If this is not the case, then the basics are
still relevant, but the code presented later on involving decoding the
Ethernet header obviously isn't :-( *sorry*. Allright... crack your
knuckles *crunch* and lets get ready to code our FIRST LIBPCAP
PROGRAM :). Go ahead and copy the following program into your
favorite editor (which should be vim if you have any sense :-)
save, and compile with...
%>gcc ldev.c -lpcap
/* ldev.c
Martin Casado
To compile:
>gcc ldev.c -lpcap
Looks for an interface, and lists the network ip
and mask associated with that interface.
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <pcap.h> /* GIMME a libpcap plz! */
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
char *dev; /* name of the device to use */
char *net; /* dot notation of the network address */
char *mask;/* dot notation of the network mask */
int ret; /* return code */
char errbuf[PCAP_ERRBUF_SIZE];
bpf_u_int32 netp; /* ip */
bpf_u_int32 maskp;/* subnet mask */
struct in_addr addr;
/* ask pcap to find a valid device for use to sniff on */
dev = pcap_lookupdev(errbuf);
/* error checking */
if(dev == NULL)
{
printf("%s\n",errbuf);
exit(1);
}
/* print out device name */
printf("DEV: %s\n",dev);
/* ask pcap for the network address and mask of the device */
ret = pcap_lookupnet(dev,&netp,&maskp,errbuf);
if(ret == -1)
{
printf("%s\n",errbuf);
exit(1);
}
/* get the network address in a human readable form */
addr.s_addr = netp;
net = inet_ntoa(addr);
if(net == NULL)/* thanks Scott :-P */
{
perror("inet_ntoa");
exit(1);
}
printf("NET: %s\n",net);
/* do the same as above for the device's mask */
addr.s_addr = maskp;
mask = inet_ntoa(addr);
if(mask == NULL)
{
perror("inet_ntoa");
exit(1);
}
printf("MASK: %s\n",mask);
return 0;
}
Did you run the program? If not, run it :-) Assuming it compiled,
and ran correctly your output should be something like...
DEV: eth0
NET: 192.168.12.0
MASK: 255.255.255.0
The value for DEV is your default interface name (likely eth0 on linux,
could be eri0 on solaris). The NET and MASK values are your primary interface's
subnet and subnet mask. Don't know what those are? Might want to read
this
.
"So what did we just do?", you ask. Well, we just asked libpcap
to give us some specs on an interface to listen on.
"Whats an interface?"
Just think of an interface as your computers hardware connection to
whatever network your computer is connected to. On Linux, eth0 denotes
the first Ethernet card in your computer. (btw you can list all of your
interfaces using the ifconfig command).
OK at this point we can compile a pcap program that essentially does nothing. On to grabbing our first packet ...