ABSTRACT-

The objective of the project is to design a Network Packet Analyzer which will comprise the
capabilities to extract the network protocol level details from receiving/transmitting packets
at/from Network Interface Card of the system in real-time.

In other words, a packet analyzer (also known as a network analyzer, protocol analyzer or packet
snifferor, for particular types of networks, an Ethernet sniffer or wireless sniffer) is a computer
program or piece of computer hardware that can intercept and log traffic that passes over a
digital network or part of a network. As data streams flow across the network, the sniffer
captures each packet and, if needed, decodes the packet's raw data, showing the values of various
fields in the packet, and analyzes its content according to the appropriate RFC or other
specifications.

The project will work at data link layer of OSI Network Model. The Analyzer will be capable of
capturing the packet at the data link layer and decode their content from raw digital form to
human readable format.

The project will be developed on Java platform and to make this Analyzer more user friendly,
Graphical User Interface (GUI) will also be developed on the same platform. Also, to quickly
differentiate various packets on the basis of their protocols, coloring rules will be applied on the
logs of the received packets.

The Analyzer will extract the bit sequences from the various headers of the packet and will
generate human readable information regarding that packet by matching those bit sequences with
the preexisting database. Also, users will have the facility to check the bit sequences of the
packets received in a properly arranged manner.

The analyzer will be capable of storing the previous captured packet information into the Internal
Memory of the system as a file.

It will also comprise a filter which will be designed to filter out the captured packets in a given
span of time on the basis of the size and the protocol of the packet. It will be capable of gathering
required information from received packets in a given time period to provide statistics
distributions of those packets.

The analyzer will comprise a search engine which will be capable of searching a particular
packet on the basis of several criteria like payload size, packet size, header size, protocol
category etc. The search engine developed on the above mentioned criteria will use optimized
searching algorithm to perform the search of a packet in the content of a file in which user intend
to search a packet, on the basis of the criteria which is selected by the user.
TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED-

Java Compiler & Editor

Computer Networking
Data Structures & Algorithms