README

Meet Junkie the network sniffer!

As the heart of SecurActive network performance monitoring application
lies a real-time packet sniffer and analyzer. Modular enough to accomplish
many different tasks, we believe this tool can be a helpful companion
to the modern network administrator and analyst, and so we decided to offer it
to the public under a liberal license so that the Open Source community can
use it, play with it, and extend it with whatever feature is deemed
appropriate.

Compared to previously available tools junkie lies in between tcpdump and
wireshark. Unlike tcpdump, its purpose is to parse protocols of any depth;
unlike wireshark, through, junkie is designed to analyze traffic in real-time
and so cannot parse traffic as completely as wireshark does.

In addition, junkie's design encompasses extendability and speed:

- plug-in system + high-level extension language that eases the development and
  combination of new functionalities;

- threaded packet capture and analysis for handling of high bandwidth network;

- modular architecture to ease the addition of any protocol layer;

- based on libpcap for portability;

- well tested on professional settings.


Junkie is still being maintained and extended by SecurActive dedicated team
but we believe it can be further extended to fulfill many unforeseen purposes.

Welcome aboard!