PacketMachine

A high-performance and simplified network traffic decoding library in C++.

#include <iostream>
#include <packetmachine.hpp>

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
  pm::Machine m;

  m.on("TCP", [](const pm::Property& p) {
      std::cout << "TCP: " <<
          p["IPv4.src"] << ":" << p["TCP.src_port"] << " > " <<
          p["IPv4.dst"] << ":" << p["TCP.dst_port"] << std::endl;
    });

  m.add_pcapdev("eth0");
  m.loop();
}

PacketMachine is ...

• High performance packet decoding library
• Able to capture network traffic via existing mechanism (e.g. libpcap)

PacketMachine is not ...

• Packet capturing mechanism for higher performance than netmap, DPDK, etc.
• Packet crafting library.

Features

• Event callback model for network traffic decoding.
• Easy access to parameter of network traffic packet, such as p["IPv4.src"]
• Multi-threading (read/capture thread + decoding thread)

Performance

Packet processing performance depends on kinds of task and data set. The chart shows a result of benchmark with simple packet counting task and 3 data set. In the task, PacketMachine marked over 2,000,000 pps (Packet Per Second). This is about three times faster than libtins that is a C++ library for packet decoding and crafting.

See a benchmark document for more detail.

How to use

Install

Note: Install libpcap before setup of PacketMachine.

$ git clone --recurse-submodules  https://github.com/m-mizutani/packetmachine.git
$ cd packetmachine
$ cmake . && make
$ sudo make install

See install.md for more details.

Compile

Prepare example.cc as below:

#include <iostream>
#include <packetmachine.hpp>

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
  pm::Machine m;

  m.on("UDP", [](const pm::Property& p) {
      std::cout << "UDP: " <<
          p["IPv4.src"] << ":" << p["UDP.src_port"] << " > " <<
          p["IPv4.dst"] << ":" << p["UDP.dst_port"] << std::endl;
    });

  m.add_pcapdev(argv[1]);
  m.loop();

  return 0;
}

Compile example.cc and run it.

$ clang++ -std=c++11 example.cc -o example -lpacketmachine
$ sudo ./example eth0
UDP: 199.59.148.241:443 > 172.20.10.2:53227
UDP: 172.20.10.2:53227 > 199.59.148.241:443
...

Documents

• Installation guide
• Tutorial
• References
  • Parameter List
  • Event List
  • Config List

License

• main part: 2-clause BSD license
• test/gtest*: from Google Test, Google Inc. The BSD 3-Clause License
• src/utils/hash.cc: from Chromium, Google Inc. The BSD 3-Clause License

Author

• Masayoshi Mizutani mizutani@sfc.wide.ad.jp