Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Advise

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From: Chris Zakelj <cazakelj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 08:59:58 -0400
Dorcas Batwala wrote:
Dear users,

I am doing some research for a Masters thesis. The research is centred round Defense against denial of service attacks. I have read about this software and want to know if I can use it for the work I need to do.

I have to do some packet sniffing on a network and compile statistics and get a general distribution for packets under normal conditions and then packets under DDOS attack. So I need a tool that can generate statistics for me by sniffing packets and showing how many are SYN, SYN-ACK, etc in a given window of time.

Can Ethereal do this? If so how must I set it up to get this info.

Thanks.

Dorcas

Depending on the OS you're using, you may not need ethereal for this. For example, I am currently running a transparent firewall using OpenBSD 3.3-STABLE, and one of the things you can do with the pfctl tool (the command interpreter for pf) is show statistics on how many packets were passed/dropped, and with a perl/shell script, can parse out the logs to show you which rule "won" with respect to particular packets.