Free File: Mousezahn Open source free fast traffic generator and packet crafter tool

Monday, October 31, 2016

Mousezahn Open source free fast traffic generator and packet crafter tool

Mausezahn is a free fast traffic generator written in C which allows you to send nearly every possible and impossible packet. It is mainly used to test VoIP or multicast networks but also for security audits to check whether your systems are hardened enough for specific attacks.

Mausezahn can be used for example:

As traffic generator (e. g. to stress multicast networks)
To precisely measure jitter (delay variations) between two hosts (e. g. for VoIP-SLA verification)
As didactical tool during a datacom lecture or for lab exercises
For penetration testing of firewalls and IDS
For DoS attacks on networks (for audit purposes of course)
To find bugs in network software or appliances
For reconnaissance attacks using ping sweeps and port scans
To test network behavior under strange circumstances (stress test, malformed packets)

Mausezahn is basically a versatile packet creation tool on the command line with a simple syntax and context help. It could also be used within (bash-) scripts to perform combination of tests. By the way, Mausezahn is quite fast; when started on my old PIII-Laptop (1.4 GHz, Gigabit Ethernet) I measured 755 Mbit/s using the interface packet counters of an HP ProCurve 5400 switch.

Currently Mausezahn is only available for Linux platforms. Please do NOT PORT Mausezahn to Windows! (Here is a nice explanation why; I really share Felix von Leitner’s point of view.)