Sniffing packets on your network

If you are interested in sniffing packets on your local network, this recipe can be used as the starting point. Remember that you may not be able to sniff packets other than what is destined to your machine, as decent network switches will only forward traffic that is designated for your machine.

Getting ready

You need to install the pylibpcap library (Version 0.6.4 or greater) for this recipe to work. In Debian-based Linux systems, you may install it using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install python-libpcap

It is also available at SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pylibpcap/).

Python 3 may require you to install pypcap using pip instead:

$ sudo pip install pypcap

You also need to install the construct library, which can be installed from PyPI via pip or easy_install, as shown in the following command:

$ easy_install construct

Note

You may also install construct directly from https://github.com/construct/construct/releases.

How to do it...

We can...