PacketWarden

PacketWarden is a fast, beautifully designed, and cross-platform network packet sniffer built with Rust. It features a rich, Wireshark-inspired Graphical User Interface (GUI) powered by the iced framework.

Features

• Live Packet Capture: Monitor network traffic in real-time.
• Deep Packet Inspection: Parse and analyze Ethernet, IPv4, TCP, UDP, TLS/SSL, ARP, and OSPF frames.
• Wireshark Aesthetics: Polished interface with protocol-based row coloring (e.g., UDP in light blue, TCP in gray, OSPF in yellow) and a side visual packet map.
• Display Filters: Instantly filter captured packets by protocol, source, destination, or info strings.
• Detailed Packet Analysis: Expandable, tree-like detail views for packet headers and layered protocols.
• Hex Dump Viewer: View the raw byte-level content of packets aligned with standard hexadecimal offset and ASCII representation.

Prerequisites

PacketWarden relies on libpcap to capture packets from your network interfaces.

• macOS / Linux: libpcap is usually pre-installed.
• Windows: You will need to install Npcap (make sure to install it in "WinPcap API-compatible Mode").

Installation & Running

1. Clone the repository (if you haven't already):

2. Run the application: Because packet sniffing requires elevated system privileges, you must run the application with administrative or root access.

   On macOS/Linux:

   sudo cargo run

   On Windows (run your terminal as Administrator):

   cargo run

Building for Production

To distribute the application, you can build a highly optimized release binary.

1. Build the release binary:

   cargo build --release

   The compiled executable will be located at target/release/packetwarden (or packetwarden.exe on Windows).

2. Packaging for Windows (.exe):

   • The .exe generated in target/release/packetwarden.exe is a standalone executable. You can simply share this file.
   • For a full installer setup, consider using tools like Inno Setup.

3. Packaging for macOS (.app and .dmg):

   • Install cargo-bundle to package the binary into a native macOS app bundle:

     cargo install cargo-bundle
     cargo bundle --release

   • Your .app will be created in target/release/bundle/osx/.
   • To create a .dmg, you can use the built-in macOS hdiutil or tools like create-dmg:

     brew install create-dmg
     create-dmg "PacketWarden.dmg" "target/release/bundle/osx/PacketWarden.app"

Key Technologies

• Rust
• Iced (GUI Framework)
• pnet (Networking/Packet parsing)
• pcap (Packet capture bindings)

License

MIT License