NETCAP (A Network traffic monitoring sniffer)

From hundreds to thousands of computers,hubs to switched networks,network administrators need more sophisticated network traffic monitoring tools in order to deal with the increase.These network monitoring tools are needed in order to perform their work,to obtain the data transiting on a network and capturing it while the network is working.The capture process consists of listening on the network,every transiting frame,independently from its source or destination. However,most of the network traffic monitoring sniffer display data packets that are captured in a less-readable format which are difficult to be analyzed by newbie network administrators or students that are learning to analyze network traffic flow.Moreover,most of the sniffers only use command-line to run.Thus,NetCap is developed to display a more readable and detailed data packets information that are captured and to display a more user-friendly graphical interface.The information about sniffer is searched to analyze the functions of sniffer and research methodology is done to plan,design and implement the sniffer.Software capture architecture for the Microsoft's Win32 operating system family is analyzed.This architecture includes a low-level framework,winpcap that adds to Win32 operating systems the ability to efficiently capture data from the most used network families.Based on that,NetCap is design and implemented using Netbeans 6.9.1. Furthermore, it also uses JCommon 1.0.16 and JFreeChart L0.13,library for Java platform to support and develop a real-time packets flow graph in NetCap.This paper uses jpcap,a Java library for capturing packets which is used to develop applications to capture packets from network interfaces plus analyze them in Java,and winpcap,a windows version of libpcap library which includes driver to support capturing packets on windows to design NetCap which is compatible to be used in windows platform