Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Packet Sniffing
Search
Preetam Jinka
September 20, 2014
Programming
1
240
Packet Sniffing
Preetam Jinka
September 20, 2014
Tweet
Share
More Decks by Preetam Jinka
See All by Preetam Jinka
Downsampling, Time Series, and PostgreSQL
preetamjinka
1
810
Siesta: RESTful Services Made Simple
preetamjinka
0
120
Time Series Storage @ Data Hackers
preetamjinka
1
190
Time Series Storage
preetamjinka
13
2.8k
Intro to (Relational) Databases 2015
preetamjinka
1
310
Intro to Databases
preetamjinka
0
190
Other Decks in Programming
See All in Programming
re:Invent 2025 のイケてるサービスを紹介する
maroon1st
0
160
組み合わせ爆発にのまれない - 責務分割 x テスト
halhorn
1
170
クラウドに依存しないS3を使った開発術
simesaba80
0
200
perlをWebAssembly上で動かすと何が嬉しいの??? / Where does Perl-on-Wasm actually make sense?
mackee
0
250
LLM Çağında Backend Olmak: 10 Milyon Prompt'u Milisaniyede Sorgulamak
selcukusta
0
140
愛される翻訳の秘訣
kishikawakatsumi
3
360
脳の「省エネモード」をデバッグする ~System 1(直感)と System 2(論理)の切り替え~
panda728
PRO
0
130
Rubyで鍛える仕組み化プロヂュース力
muryoimpl
0
250
HTTPプロトコル正しく理解していますか? 〜かわいい猫と共に学ぼう。ฅ^•ω•^ฅ ニャ〜
hekuchan
2
580
DevFest Android in Korea 2025 - 개발자 커뮤니티를 통해 얻는 가치
wisemuji
0
180
AtCoder Conference 2025
shindannin
0
840
Denoのセキュリティに関する仕組みの紹介 (toranoana.deno #23)
uki00a
0
200
Featured
See All Featured
Stop Working from a Prison Cell
hatefulcrawdad
273
21k
Efficient Content Optimization with Google Search Console & Apps Script
katarinadahlin
PRO
0
260
The Curse of the Amulet
leimatthew05
0
6.5k
How to Grow Your eCommerce with AI & Automation
katarinadahlin
PRO
0
81
Fireside Chat
paigeccino
41
3.8k
Groundhog Day: Seeking Process in Gaming for Health
codingconduct
0
67
Ten Tips & Tricks for a 🌱 transition
stuffmc
0
39
Leading Effective Engineering Teams in the AI Era
addyosmani
9
1.4k
Automating Front-end Workflow
addyosmani
1371
200k
Data-driven link building: lessons from a $708K investment (BrightonSEO talk)
szymonslowik
1
860
Visualization
eitanlees
150
16k
Why Our Code Smells
bkeepers
PRO
340
58k
Transcript
Packet Sniffing Preetam Jinka (@preetamjinka) beCamp 2014 Intro to
Code examples https://github.com/PreetamJinka/packet-sniffing
Background What’s a socket? What’s a packet?
Background What’s a socket? They’re basically channels for packets to
travel across. What’s a packet? The fundamental unit of data in networking. A chunk of bytes, perhaps.
None
• Datagram (e.g. UDP) • Stream (e.g. TCP) • Raw
◦ “It’s RAW!” Types of sockets
The socket() syscall “ socket() creates an endpoint for communication
and returns a descriptor. int socket(int domain, int type, int protocol); ”
TCP and UDP are complicated, right? • TCP ◦ Stateful
◦ Connections ◦ Ports • UDP ◦ Stateless ◦ Ports
None
Abstractions make sockets simpler. Your programming environment takes care of
setting up sockets. You just have to send data. The packets are constructed for you (by the OS).
TCP sockets in Node.js var net = require('net'); var server
= net.createServer(function (socket) { socket.write('Echo server\r\n'); socket.pipe(socket); }); server.listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');
When a socket is bound to an address:port, it only
receives data sent to that address:port. The kernel manages that for you.
Let’s rip away the abstractions. Make things RAW!
Let’s make a RAW socket (in Go). Demo #1.
What are we seeing?
Protocol decoding It’s protocols all the way down! (Interesting computer
science problems.)
Applications
Applications
Let’s decode ethernet (and others) Demo #2.
Issue #1 We see everything, but we don’t want to.
Solution? Filter.
Filtering
Let’s filter by a port. Demo #3.
Payloads We’ve only been looking at headers. Let’s read the
rest of the packet.
TCP Payloads Demo #4.
What else can we do? Look at TCP flags. SYN
but not ACK => connection opened FIN and ACK => connection closed
Caveats We’re not considering connection states. SSL/TLS? Resource utilization (how
fast can we sniff?)
Caveats We’re not considering connection states. SSL/TLS? Resource utilization (how
fast can we sniff?) If you’re not reading from the socket fast enough, the kernel buffer fills up and it will drop packets.
Technique: sampling If you only want a representative sample, pick
1 in N packets. Ignore the rest. Upside: monitor lots of network traffic Downside: not accurate (See me if you want to learn about sFlow)
Sampling demo “topflows” https://github.com/PreetamJinka/flowtools/tree/master/topflows Very easy to turn this into
a DDoS detector.
More fun ideas You can read from raw sockets, but
you can also write to raw sockets. Construct your own Ethernet, IP, and TCP/UDP packets! Write your own protocol on top of IPv4/IPv6!
Questions?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/qwrrty/2791283248/ https://vividcortex.com/blog/2014/07/25/prepared-statement-samples/ http://snmp.co.uk/scrutinizer/main.htm Wikipedia for the diagrams Photo credits