Libpcapy

Libpcapy is a Python wrapper for libpcap, an interface written in C for user-level packet captures. The motivation for the development of this library was the need of a high-performance packet sniffer (with a high packet processing rate) while programming with Python. This project uses the ctypes library.

Dependencies

Libpcap:

Ubuntu/Debian:

apt-get install libpcap-dev

CentOS/Fedora:

dnf install libpcap-devel

Arch:

pacman -S libpcap

Or you can download it here and install it yourself.

Install

Install Libpcapy with pip:

pip3 install libpcapy

Example

from libpcapy import capture  
  
# Callback function to be called every time the sniffer catches a packet  
def my_callback(pkthdr, data, user_data):  
    print("Packet arrived!")  
    print("\tTimestamp: ", pkthdr.ts.tv_sec)  
    print("\tLength: ", pkthdr.caplen)  
  
  
# Find all capture devices  
devices = capture.pcap_findalldevs()  
device = devices[0]  
  
# Set snapshot lenght, promiscuous mode and timeout  
snaplen = 65535 # maximum number of bytes to be captured by pcap  
promisc = 1 # promiscuous mode  
to_ms = 10000 # timeout  
  
print("Capturing on %s" % device)  
handle = capture.pcap_open_live(device, snaplen, promisc, to_ms)  
  
if handle:  
    bpf = capture.bpf_program()  
    # Setting a filter  
    result = capture.pcap_setfilter(handle, bpf)  
    capture.call_loop(handle, -1, my_callback, None)  
  
print("Closing live capture")  
capture.pcap_close(handle)

Note: You need to execute this script with a user that has capture priviledges, such as root.