Version 1.3
Last Modified on: Thu Nov 11 18:18:19 PST 1999
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The following FAQ attempts to answer questions regarding raw IP or low level IP networking, including raw sockets, and network monitoring APIs such as BPF and DLPI.
If you find anything you can add, have some corrections for me or would like a question answered, please send email to:
Thamer Al-Herbish <shadows@whitefang.com>
Please remember to include whether or not you want your email address reproduced on the FAQ (if you're contributing). Also remember that you may want to post your question to Usenet, instead of sending it to me. If you get a response which is not found on this FAQ, and you feel is relevant, mail me both copies and I'll attempt to include it.
Also a word on raw socket bugs. I get approximately a couple of emails a month about them, and sometimes I just can't verify if the bug exists on a said system. Before mailing in the report, double check with my example source code. If it looks like it's a definite bug, then mail it in.
Special thanks to John W. Temples <john@whitefang.com> for his constant healthy criticism and editing of the FAQ.
Credit is given to the contributor as his/her contribution appears in the FAQ, along with a list of all contributors at the end of this document.
A final note, a Raw IP Networking mailing list is up. You can join by sending an empty message to rawip-subscribe@whitefang.com
This FAQ covers only information relevant to the UNIX environment.
Depending on your operating system, the following is an incomplete list of available tools:
| tcpdump: | Found out-of-the-box on most BSD variants, and also available separately from ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/tcpdump.tar.Z along with libpcap (see below) and various other tools. This tool, in particular, has been ported to multiple platforms thanks to libpcap. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ipgrab | Compatible with many systems. ipgrab displays link level, transport level, and network level information on packets captured verbosely. http://www.xnet.com/~cathmike/MSB/Software/ | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ethereal | (GUI) A network packet analyzer (uses GTK+). Supports many systems. Available at: http://ethereal.zing.org/ | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| tcptrace: | http://jarok.cs.ohiou.edu/software/tcptrace/tcptrace.html Not an actual sniffer, but can read from the logs produced by many other well known sniffers to produce output in different formats and in adjustable details (includes diagnostics). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| tcpflow | http://www.circlemud.org/~jelson/software/tcpflow/ tcpflow is a program that captures data transmitted as part of TCP connections (flows), and stores the data in a way that is convenient for protocol analysis or debugging. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| snoop: | Solaris, IRIX. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| etherfind: | SunOS. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Packetman: | SunOS, DEC-MIPS, SGI, DEC-Alpha, and Solaris. Available at ftp://ftp.cs.curtin.edu.au:/pub/netman/ | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| nettl/ntfmt: | HP/UX | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Depending on your operating system (different versions may vary):
| BPF: | Berkeley Packet Filter. Commonly found on BSD variants. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| DLPI: | Data Link Provider Interface. Solaris, HP-UX, SCO Openserver. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| NIT: | Network Interface Tap. SunOS 3. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SNOOP: | (???). IRIX. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SNIT: | STREAMS Network Interface Tap. SunOS 4. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SOCK_PACKET: | Linux. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| LSF: | Linux Socket Filter. Is available on Linux 2.1.75 onwards. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| drain: | Used to snoop packets dropped by the OS. IRIX. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yes. libpcap from ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/libpcap.tar.Z attempts to provide a single API that interfaces with different OS-dependent packet capturing APIs. It's always best, of course, to learn the underlying APIs in case this library might hide some interesting features. It's important to warn the reader that I have seen different versions of libpcap break backward compatibility.
The exact details are dependent on the operating system. However, the following will attempt to illustrate the usual technique used in various implementations:
The user process opens a device or issues a system call which gives it a descriptor with which it can read packets off the wire. The kernel then passes the packets straight to the process.
However, this wouldn't work too well on a busy network or a slow machine. The user process has to read the packets as fast as they appear on the network. That's where buffering and packet filtering come in.
The kernel will buffer up to X bytes of packet data, and pass the packets one by one at the user's request. If the amount exceeds a certain limit (resources are finite), the packets are dropped and are not placed in the buffer.
Packet filters allow a process to dictate which packets it's interested in. The usual way is to have a set of opcodes for routines to perform on the packet, reading values off it, and deciding whether or not it's wanted. These opcodes usually perform very simple operations, allowing powerful filters to be constructed.
BPF filters and then buffers; this is optimal since the buffer only contains packets that are interesting to the process. It's hoped that the filter cuts down the amount of packets buffered to stop overflowing the buffer, which leads to packet loss.
NIT, unfortunately, does not do this; it applies the filter after buffering, when the user process starts to read from the buffered data.
According to route <route@infonexus.com> Linux' SOCK_PACKET does not do any buffering and has no kernel filtering.
Your mileage may vary with other packet capturing facilities.
If you're experiencing a lot of packet loss, you may want to limit the scope of the packets read by using filters. This will only work if the filtering is done before any buffering. If this still doesn't work because your packet capturing facility is broken like NIT, you'll have to read the packets faster in a user process and send them to another process -- basically attempt to do additional buffering in user space.
Another way of improving performance, is by using a larger buffer. On Irix using SNOOP, the man page recommends using SO_RCVBUF. On BSD with BPF one can use the BIOCSBLEN ioctl call to increase the buffer size. On Solaris bufmod and pfmod can be used for altering buffer size and filters respectively.
Remember, the longer your process is busy and not attending the incoming packets, the quicker they'll be dropped by the kernel.
(Question suggested by Michael T. Stolarchuk <mts@rare.net> along with some suggestions for the answer.)
Network diagnostics such as the verification of a network's setup, examples are tools like arp, that report the ARP messages sent from hosts.
Reconstruction of end to end sessions. tcpshow attempts to do this, but more sophisticated examples are the array of security tools which try to keep tabs on network connections.
Monitoring network load. Probably one of the most practical uses, a lot of commercial products usually use specialized hardware to accomplish this.
No, the packet capturing facilities mentioned make copies of the packets, and do not remove them from the system's TCP/IP stack. If you wish to prevent packets from reaching the TCP/IP stack you need to use a firewall, (which should be able to do packet filtering). Don't confuse the packet filtering done by packet capturing facilities with those done by firewalls. They serve different purposes.
Yes, route <route@infonexus.com> maintains Libnet, a library that provides an API for low level packet writing and handling. It serves as a good compliment for libpcap, if you wish to read and write packets. The project's webpage can be found at:
A PERL module that gives access to raw sockets is available at:
A Python library "py-libpap" can be found at:
The BSD socket API allows one to open a raw socket and bypass layers in the TCP/IP stack. Be warned that if an OS doesn't support correct BSD semantics (correct is used loosely here), you're going to have a hard time making it work. Below, an attempt is made to address some of the bugs or surprises you're in store for. On almost all sane systems only root (superuser) can open a raw socket.
Depending on what you want to send, you initially open a socket and give it its type.
sockd = socket(AF_INET,SOCK_RAW,<protocol>);
You can choose from any protocol including IPPROTO_RAW. The protocol number goes into the IP header verbatim. IPPROTO_RAW places 0 in the IP header.
Most systems have a socket option IP_HDRINCL which allows you to include your own IP header along with the rest of the packet. If your system doesn't have this option, you may or may not be able to include your own IP header. If it is available, you should use it as such:
char on = 1;
setsockopt(sockd,IPPROTO_IP,IP_HDRINCL,&on,sizeof(on));
Of course, if you don't want to include an IP header, you can always specify a protocol in the creation of the socket and slip your transport level header under it.
You then build the packet and use a normal sendto().
Examples can be found at http://www.whitefang.com/rin/ which attempt to illustrate the details involved. They also illustrate some of the bugs mentioned below.
Briefly, you need to actually write the packet out in memory and hand it over to the socket where it will hopefully fire it away and await more packets.
Traditionally the BSD socket API did not allow you to listen to just any incoming packet via a raw socket. Although Linux (2.0.30 was the last version I had a look at), did allow this, it has to do with their own implementation of the TCP/IP stack. Correct BSD semantics allow you to get some packets which match a certain category (see below).
There's a logical reason behind this; for example TCP packets are always handled by the kernel. If the port is open, send a SYN-ACK and establish the connection, or send back a RST. On the other hand, some types of ICMP (I compiled a small list below), the kernel can't handle. Like an ICMP echo reply, is passed to a matching raw socket, since it was meant for a user program to receive it.
The solution is to firewall that particular port if it was a UDP or TCP packet, and sniff it with a packet capturing API (a list is mentioned above). This prevents the TCP/IP stack from handling the packet, thus it will be ignored and you can handle it yourself without intervention.
If you don't firewall it, and reply yourself you'll wind up having additional responses from your operating system!
Here's a concise explanation of the semantics of a raw BSD socket, taken from a Usenet post by W. Richard Stevens
From <rstevens@kohala.com> (Sun Jul 6 12:07:07 1997) :
"The semantics of BSD raw sockets are:
| - | TCP and UDP: no one other than the kernel gets these. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| - | ICMP: a copy of each ICMP gets passed to each matching raw socket, except for a few that the kernel generates the reply for: ICMP echo request, timestamp request, and mask request. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| - | IGMP: all of these get passed to all matching raw sockets. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| - | all other protocols that the kernel doesn't deal with (OSPF, etc.): these all get passed to all matching raw sockets." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
After looking at the icmp_input() routine from the 4.4BSD's TCP/IP stack, it seems the following ICMP types will be passed to matching raw sockets:
Echo Reply: (0)
Router Advertisement (9)
Time Stamp Reply (13)
Mask Reply (18)
Systems derived from 4.4BSD have a bug in which the ip_len and ip_off members of the ip header have to be set in host byte order rather than network byte order. Some systems may have fixed this. I've confirmed this bug has been fixed on OpenBSD 2.1.
Thanks to Michael Masino <mmasino@mitre.org> , Lamont Granquist <lamontg@hitl.washington.edu> , and route <route@infonexus.com> for the submission of bug reports.
Some systems will process some of the fields in the IP and transport headers. I've attempted to verify the reports I've received here's what I can verify for sure.
Solaris (at least 2.5/2.6) and changes the IP ID field, and adds a Do Not Fragment flag to the IP header (IP_DF). It also expects the checksum to contain the length of the transport level header, and the data.
Further reports which I cannot verify (can't reproduce), consist of claims that Solaris 2.x and Irix 6.x will change the sequence and acknowledgment numbers. Irix 6.x is also believed to have the problem mentioned in the previous paragraph. If you experience these problems, double check with the example source code.
You'll save yourself a lot of trouble by just getting Libnet http://www.packetfactory.net/libnet/
Various UNIX utilities use raw sockets, among them are: traceroute, ping, arp. Also, a lot of Internet security tools make use of raw sockets. However in the long run, raw sockets have proven bug ridden, unportable and limited in use.
libpcap was written so that applications could do packet capturing portably. Since it's system independent and supports numerous operating systems, your packet capturing application becomes more portable to various other systems.
Yes, libpcap will only use in-kernel packet filtering when using BPF, which is found on BSD derived systems. This means any packet filters used on other operating systems which don't use BPF will be done in user space, thus losing out on a lot of speed and efficiency. This is not what you want, because packet loss can increase when sniffing a busy network.
DEC OSF/1 has an API which has been extended to support BPF-style filters; libpcap does utilize this.
In the future, libpcap may translate BPF style filters to other packet capturing facilities, but this has not been implemented yet as of version 0.3
Refer to question 1.4 to see how packet filters help in reliably monitoring your network.
A lot of the source code found at LBNL's ftp archive ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/ uses libpcap. More specifically, ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/tcpdump.tar.Z probably demonstrates libpcap to a large extent.