With most of my projects, I’ve noticed that before I can really begin to delve into them, I first have to learn something completely new.

I don’t do most of my work in Perl, but I can definitely make ends meet. My more recent work in Perl has dealt w/ RIP scanning and route-updating (a lot of DSL CPE tends to have RIP enabled). Packet creation isn’t that difficult, and using Perl I could bang out a script in a short period of time.

Usually for packet manipulation, I stay away from Perl – instead I’m a huge fan of Hping[23]. If you’re wanting to watch and play w/ the transport layer – an old laptop with hping and wireshark running is definitely the way to go. If you want to test MTU problems, or ACLs  –  Hping is fast and easy.

Hping is an amazing tool – one of my favorites. Hand crafted TCP and UDP traceroutes are easy as hell, and hand crafting TCP timestamp requests is easy too. Just read the manpages and you’ll find all sorts of interesting features of TCP/IP.

The downside to Hping is that it doesn’t seem to be under regular development (last release 2005?), and IPv6 isn’t supported yet (Aside from some basic third-party patches). Application layer creation is also left for other utilities to handle (But in all fairness – that’s not it’s job)

I was a late adopter, but about a year ago I made a new friend (and picked up some python along the way). My new best friend is Scapy. “Scapy is a powerful interactive packet manipulation program. It is able to forge or decode packets of a wide number of protocols, send them on the wire, capture them, match requests and replies, and much more.” It runs in interactive and script-able mode, and thus far it’s proven to be quite powerful. It also supports IPv6.

Scapy understands a large number of Application level protocols (SNMP, TFTP, SMB, etc, etc), and makes it easy for one to craft such packets.  When I recently realized early versions of Cisco IP Router Export have corrupt headers – Scapy came to the rescue (albeit, only to rip the headers off, as fixing them wasn’t possible).  When I wanted to craft a quick and easy FreeRadius Packet of Death – Scapy came to the rescue.

Another great thing about Scapy is that it’s easy to add “layers” (protocols). Recently I sat down with the RFC’s for OSPF and in about 2 days time had fully implemented OSPF in Scapy – learning a lot about the protocol along the way. (Dirk Loss had beat me and submitted it first, but that was besides the point).

Looking for a fun new world to poke, and tired of IPv4? Sign up for a 6-in-4 tunnel and go exploring. Just make sure you pack Scapy and a handy guide.