EtherApe


EtherApe is a packet sniffer/network traffic monitoring tool, developed for Unix. EtherApe is free, open source software developed under the GNU General Public License.

Functionality

Network traffic is displayed using a graphical interface. Each node represents a specific host. Links represent connections to hosts. Nodes and links are color-coded to represent different protocols forming the various types of traffic on the network. Individual nodes and their connecting links grow and shrink in size with increases and decreases in network traffic.
EtherApe version 0.9.14-1 still depends on GConf, GnomeVFS and GTK+ version 2. Sooner or later somebody might port it to dconf, GVfs, D-Bus and GTK+ version 3 or 4.

History

Originally authored by Juan Toledo, the first version of EtherApe was released on February 18, 2000. In a 2006 survey, Insecure.org named EtherApe number 43 on its list of the "Top 100 Network Security Tools". The most recent version of EtherApe, authored by Zev Weiss and Riccardo Ghetta, is 0.9.15 and was released on February 10, 2017.

Features

Some of the features listed about EtherApe include :
EtherApe requires root privileges to capture packets. As of release 0.9.15 capturing is delegated to a separate process, while the main interface can run with lower privileges, significantly reducing the risk associated with capturing packets from untrusted sources.