A collection of high-performance applications and tools designed for sending network packets. It serves two main purposes: penetration testing, which involves assessing network security by simulating various attacks like Denial of Service (DoS); and network monitoring, which involves analyzing and inspecting network traffic.
Among these applications, two stand out as they utilize AF_XDP (eXpress Data Path) and the DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) technologies. AF_XDP is a fast and efficient network socket technology, while the DPDK is a kernel-bypass framework that allows for optimized packet processing in the user space.
By leveraging AF_XDP and the DPDK, these special applications can generate a significant amount of network traffic, making the most out of the available hardware resources.
With that said, if these applications are launched from multiple sources to the same network/IP address, it is considered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
These applications allow you to customize many of the packet's contents including layer 2/3/4 headers and payload data along with launch different types of attacks at once or in a chain via sequences.
NOTE - This project was inspired by my previous Packet Sequence project. Packet Sequence only supports AF_PACKETv3 Linux sockets, though.
NOTE 5-4-24 - Recently, I've been working on overhauling Packet Batch as a whole which includes a major change in the configuration layout (switching from YAML to JSON syntax). However, recent changes have not been applied to the Standard and the DPDK versions. This is because the AF_XDP version is the most popular (assuming due to simplicity/performance) and I want to focus on one version until my ideas/overhaul are fully implemented. Once things are stable, I will implement changes to the other two versions of Packet Batch. I've been extremely busy with work and life, so I haven't been able to implement changes in a timely manner and I apologize for that. My goal is to make Packet Batch capable of sending many packets every second that would make it better for penetration testing against firewalls and such (something I've been doing a lot myself against my own firewalls). Thank you for understanding!
As mentioned above, there are three applications for this project; Standard, AF_XDP, and DPDK.
- Standard - Utilizes
AF_PACKETLinux sockets and supports TCP cooked sockets for establishing TCP connections automatically. - AF_XDP - Uses
AF_XDPLinux sockets which is faster thanAF_PACKETv3, but doesn't support TCP cooked sockets. - DPDK - Uses the DPDK which is faster than other applications, but since the DPDK is a kernel-bypass library, it is harder to setup and only supports certain hardware. The tool also doesn't support TCP cooked sockets.
If Packet Batch does not meet your expectations/needs, there are other tools that may accomplish what you're looking for, so I wanted to list them here. I will build this list as time goes on and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to reach out to me!