быстрый многопоточный генератор сетевых пакетов (a fast, multithreaded network packet generator)
Имя (Name)
trafgen - a fast, multithreaded network packet generator
Синопсис (Synopsis)
trafgen [options] [packet]
Описание (Description)
trafgen is a fast, zero-copy network traffic generator for
debugging, performance evaluation, and fuzz-testing. trafgen
utilizes the packet(7) socket interface of Linux which postpones
complete control over packet data and packet headers into the
user space. It has a powerful packet configuration language,
which is rather low-level and not limited to particular
protocols. Thus, trafgen can be used for many purposes. Its only
limitation is that it cannot mimic full streams resp. sessions.
However, it is very useful for various kinds of load testing in
order to analyze and subsequently improve systems behaviour under
DoS attack scenarios, for instance.
trafgen is Linux specific, meaning there is no support for other
operating systems, same as netsniff-ng(8), thus we can keep the
code footprint quite minimal and to the point. trafgen makes use
of packet(7) socket's TX_RING interface of the Linux kernel,
which is a mmap(2)'ed ring buffer shared between user and kernel
space.
By default, trafgen starts as many processes as available CPUs,
pins each of them to their respective CPU and sets up the ring
buffer each in their own process space after having compiled a
list of packets to transmit. Thus, this is likely the fastest one
can get out of the box in terms of transmission performance from
user space, without having to load unsupported or non-mainline
third-party kernel modules. On Gigabit Ethernet, trafgen has a
comparable performance to pktgen, the built-in Linux kernel
traffic generator, except that trafgen is more flexible in terms
of packet configuration possibilities. On 10-Gigabit-per-second
Ethernet, trafgen might be slower than pktgen due to the
user/kernel space overhead but still has a fairly high
performance for out of the box kernels.
trafgen has the potential to do fuzz testing, meaning a packet
configuration can be built with random numbers on all or certain
packet offsets that are freshly generated each time a packet is
sent out. With a built-in IPv4 ping, trafgen can send out an ICMP
probe after each packet injection to the remote host in order to
test if it is still responsive/alive. Assuming there is no answer
from the remote host after a certain threshold of probes, the
machine is considered dead and the last sent packet is printed
together with the random seed that was used by trafgen. You might
not really get lucky fuzz-testing the Linux kernel, but
presumably there are buggy closed-source embedded systems or
network driver's firmware files that are prone to bugs, where
trafgen could help in finding them.
trafgen's configuration language is quite powerful, also due to
the fact, that it supports C preprocessor macros. A stddef.h is
being shipped with trafgen for this purpose, so that well known
defines from Linux kernel or network programming can be reused.
After a configuration file has passed the C preprocessor stage,
it is processed by the trafgen packet compiler. The language
itself supports a couple of features that are useful when
assembling packets, such as built-in runtime checksum support for
IP, UDP and TCP. Also it has an expression evaluator where
arithmetic (basic operations, bit operations, bit shifting, ...)
on constant expressions is being reduced to a single constant on
compile time. Other features are ''fill'' macros, where a packet
can be filled with n bytes by a constant, a compile-time random
number or run-time random number (as mentioned with fuzz
testing). Also, netsniff-ng(8) is able to convert a pcap file
into a trafgen configuration file, thus such a configuration can
be further tweaked for a given scenario.
