Ettercap vs Scapy

Ettercap is a free, open-source suite for man-in-the-middle testing, live connection sniffing and network analysis. It dissects protocols actively or passively, filters packet payloads through compiled etterfilter rules, and performs network and host analysis. Passive LAN scanning can extract host, operating-system, port and gateway information from observed traffic. Command-line, graphical and ncurses interfaces are available, along with PCAP support, remote capture, traffic decryption and flow analysis. The project lists Linux and macOS platforms and supports self-hosted deployment. Tested systems include Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Pentoo, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. The latest listed release is 0.8.4.1-Garofalo, released April 7, 2026, with a fix for an etterfilter heap out-of-bounds read identified as CVE-2026-3606. Downloads include SHA256 checksums. Source builds require libraries and tools such as libpcap, libnet, pthread, zlib, CMake, Flex and Bison. The project is community run under GPL-2.0.

Scapy is a free Python packet manipulation program and library for forging or decoding packets, sending and capturing them, and matching requests with replies. It can run as an interactive shell or be used as a library. Listed tasks include scanning, tracerouting, probing, unit tests, attacks and network discovery. Users can set arbitrary field values and stack protocol layers rather than rely on predetermined templates; after a probe, Scapy returns full decoded packets before interpretation for further analysis. It can read and store pcap files, inject invalid frames and custom 802.11 frames, and be extended with protocols and add-ons. Scapy runs on Linux, macOS, BSD and Windows, though Windows installation requires Npcap. Optional plotting needs Matplotlib; TLS decryption and PKI operations need the cryptography package. The code, tests and tools use GPL v2, while the documentation uses CC BY-NC-SA 2.5. Documentation includes installation instructions, usage guides, troubleshooting and an API reference. The project supports only its latest master version, and critical bugs should be reported privately through GitHub’s security tab.