DEV Community: Giuliano Bellini

Announcing Sniffnet v1.4: introduced PCAP files import — it’s 2X faster than Wireshark!

Giuliano Bellini — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 10:55:22 +0000

I'm delighted to announce that Sniffnet v1.4 is finally available!

For those of you that still don't know it, Sniffnet is an open-source, cross-platform, Rust-based application enabling you to comfortably monitor Internet traffic (official website | GitHub repository).

This major release brings a bunch of improvements and fixes, making Sniffnet more powerful and reliable than ever before.

One of the most exciting new features is the ability to process network data from PCAP files in addition to network adapters.

PCAP (Packet Capture) is a standardized file format for storing network traffic data, widely used by many renowned network analysis tools, including tcpdump and Wireshark (the de-facto standard when it comes to network packet analyzers).

Supporting PCAP files import not only makes Sniffnet fully compatible with other network monitoring tools, but also enables to inspect historical data, which is crucial for troubleshooting and network forensics.

It takes just about 25 seconds for Sniffnet to process a 1.6 GB file (2.6 million packets) on an 8-years old MacBook Air (1,8 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5).

This corresponds to more than 100k packets per second, making it 2.2 times faster than Wireshark on the same machine, which takes about 55 seconds to process the file.

Not only Sniffnet is faster, but it also allows to preview and interact with the data while it's being processed, as opposed to Wireshark that requires the whole file to be parsed before displaying any information.

This is a notable feature, especially for large files, as it permits you to start examining the traffic immediately, without waiting for the entire file to be read.

But... how is Sniffnet this fast?

Part of the reason is that Sniffnet is based on the Rust programming language (well-known for its efficiency), but this doesn't tell the whole story.

In fact Wireshark is written in C that, despite not being as safe as Rust, is still characterized by top-tier performance.

Additionally, Sniffnet uses the pcap crate to process data, which is just a Rust binding library to libpcap (the same underlying engine used by Wireshark).

What really sets Sniffnet apart is that it takes a different approach to process network data: instead of parsing the full packets' payloads, it focuses on extracting only the most relevant fields from the packets' headers, such as IP addresses, ports, and protocols.

This minimal amount of information is then used to infer other details like countries, domain names, autonomous systems names, upper layer services, and more.

Considering that nowadays more than 90% of the web traffic uses TLS, this strategy enables having huge performance gains without losing much relevant information: if payloads are encrypted, no meaningful data can be discerned from them anyway.

Besides supporting PCAP files, Sniffnet 1.4 introduces several other features, including:

support for ARP protocol
a donut chart reporting overall traffic statistics
identification and tagging of unassigned/reserved "bogon" IP addresses
new default themes based on palettes optimized for Accessibility
enhanced notifications including more details about each event

These are just some of the most relevant changes introduced in this release.

For more details, you can check the release page on GitHub.

Sniffnet 1.3 released!

Giuliano Bellini — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 15:38:51 +0000

Sniffnet is an open source, Rust-based network monitoring tool I’ve been working on for almost two years now.

Exactly 8 months after the previous release, I’m excited to share that today Sniffnet v1.3.0 has been published.

This release introduces several long requested features, such as export of PCAP files, support for ICMP, detection of more upper layer services, and other functionalities to improve the overall user experience, such as the new thumbnail mode and the possibility to totally customize the application color palette.

I’ve also dedicated some efforts to enhance Sniffnet documentation and I’ve come up with a complete user manual hosted on GitHub Wiki.

My Open Source project has been selected for the GitHub Accelerator Program and I'll be working on it full-time!

Giuliano Bellini — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 13:32:57 +0000

Sniffnet, a network analysis tool I'm working on, has grown a lot during the past months, and it’s been a pleasure for me to spend most of my spare time on its development.
I'm not gonna lie: passing hours and hours on this project has become my favorite hobby lately.

I can’t deny that sometimes it’s been hard to balance Sniffnet’s development with the daily University routine, made of never-ending lectures, group projects, deliveries, and home study.
I often ended up coding late (I mean very late) at night or skipping meals/lectures, since 24 hours a day never seemed enough.
Seeing Sniffnet getting traction and evolving, improving day after day, motivated me to keep pushing despite the obstacles along the way.

Long story short: having more time to dedicate to open-source was one of my primary wishes (and needs 😅).

Today, it’s such a joy for me to announce that Sniffnet has been selected for the GitHub Accelerator Program 🎉

The GitHub Accelerator is a program to pioneer new ways for developers to sustainably work on their open-source projects full-time.
20 promising and influential open-source projects have been elected, out of more than a thousand total applicants.
The maintainers of such projects will participate in a 10-week program receiving an initial sponsorship as well as mentorship from open-source leaders and enterprise partners on how to grow software projects and build durable streams of funding.

This means that during the next few months I’ll be able to work on Sniffnet full-time, with the aspiration to bring it to the next level.
I’ve lots of ideas for new features and improvements and I’m looking forward to implementing them all 😁

Turning such a huge passion into a full-time job is the best thing I could’ve ever asked for.
I truly wish that this journey will continue even after the 10 weeks of the program, with the hope of working on open-source for my entire career.

I believe that more and more programmers deserve to have opportunities like this one, and I hope the Accelerator will pave the way to a brighter perspective for the open-source community.

I can’t wait to see what the future has in store, and I feel blessed to have such an amazing occasion.
I’ll do my best to get the most out of this experience 🌟

Sniffnet: monitor your network traffic with ease - New Release v1.1.0

Giuliano Bellini — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 21:00:52 +0000

Sniffnet is a simple yet insightful application to let you have a glance into your network traffic in a straightforward and appealing way.

Today it has been updated to version 1.1.0, which introduces several new functionalities:

🌍 Added Geolocation of the remote IP addresses
⭐ Implemented the possibility of marking a group of connections as favorites and added favorites view to the report
🔉 Added Custom Notifications to inform the user when defined network events occur:
- data intensity exceeded a defined packets per second rate
- data intensity exceeded a defined bytes per second rate
- new data are exchanged from one of the favorite connections

⚙️ Added Settings pages to configure the state of the application (persistently stored in a configuration file):
- customise notifications
- choose between 4 different application styles
- set the application language (this release introduces the Italian language 🇮🇹, and more languages will be supported soon)

Feedbacks and comments are warmly welcomed! Have a good day!

Comfortably monitor your internet traffic with Sniffnet

Giuliano Bellini — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 19:39:52 +0000

Sniffnet is a simple yet insightful application to let you have a glance into your network traffic in a straightforward and appealing way.

Sniffnet lets you filter and analyse your network traffic providing useful information.

The application is supported on MacOS, Windows and Linux.