What is netsniff-ng?
====================

netsniff-ng is a high performance Linux network sniffer for packet
inspection.

Basically it is similar to analyzers like tcpdump, but without the
need to perform system calls for fetching network packets. A memory
mapped area within kernelspace will be used for accessing packets,
thus there is no requirement for copying them to userspace ('zero-copy'
mechanism). For this purpose netsniff-ng is libpcap independent, but
nevertheless supports the pcap file format for capturing, replaying and
performing offline-analysis of pcap dumps. Furthermore we are focussing
on building a robust, clean and secure analyzer and utilities that
complete netsniff-ng as a support for penetration testing.

netsniff-ng can be used for protocol analysis, reverse engineering and
network debugging. 

Some use cases and features
===========================

* Open source project and free licensing
* Analizing and debugging of network problems or protocol implementations
* Reverse engineering of (proprietary) network protocols
* Dumping, replaying and offline analysis of pcap traces
* Integrated high performance capabilities
* Focus on usability, robustness, security and functionality
* Support utility for penetration testing
* Regular expression based grepping of specific packet information
* Monitoring of network usage
* Network statistic creation (e.g. for Nagios)

What are the main goals?
========================

netsniff-ngs main goal is to be a high performance network sniffer that
focuses on usability, robustness and functionality. Its aim is to support
the daily work for networking engineers, developers, admins or Linux
users by providing support with or in network monitoring, protocol
analysis, reverse engineering, network debugging and penetration testing.

Homepage
========

You can reach us via http://www.netsniff-ng.org/.

Installation
============

For installation instructions, have a look at INSTALL.

Development
===========

There's a public Git repository at http://github.com/danborkmann/netsniff-ng/
where you can check out the latest code base.

git clone git://github.com/danborkmann/netsniff-ng.git

Note that there is also a HACKING and TODO file for further readings. Next to 
this we've set up a FAQ page with development questions at 
http://netsniff-ng.org/faq.html.

Our coding conventions can be found in CODING.

Contact
=======

For questions:
    <workgroup@netsniff-ng.org>,
    <netsniff-ng@googlegroups.com>,
    http://netsniff-ng.org/faq.html
    #netsniff-ng on freenode.org

For bugs:
    <bugs@netsniff-ng.org>,
    http://github.com/danborkmann/netsniff-ng/issues/

For improvements, hacks and all the rest:
    <workgroup@netsniff-ng.org>

Website:
    http://www.netsniff-ng.org/

IRC:
    #netsniff-ng on freenode.org

Hosted on and associated with:
    http://www.gnumaniacs.org/

In honorem ...
==============

Leipzig University of Applied Science, 
Faculty of Computer Science, Mathematics and Natural Sciences
http://www.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/

