Comparative study of two most popular packet sniffing tools-Tcpdump and Wireshark

Abstract

With the ever expanding sphere of Internet and its applications, the scope of Networking, data transfer and data security too have tremendously increased. This has led to sophisticated tools that are though useful in cyber mitigation but are also widely used by cyber criminals to eavesdrop or gain illegal access. This Statement stands true for Network monitoring and Packet Sniffing tools. Though, they were designed to assist the network administrators in better assessing the servers, traffic and diagnosing the issues but they have become the favorite tool of hackers to scan a particular network and sniff on unprotected data. White Hat hackers use these tools to prevent such attacks by criminals as they identify and filter out malicious packets and their source. In this paper, we have thoroughly compared two of the most widely used open source packet sniffing and network monitoring tools-Wireshark and Tcpdump.