dsniff
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Enhanced fork of dsniff network sniffer with cookie logging, deep-packet inspection, and hidden command-line options.
Summary
dsniff is an open-source command-line network sniffer that captures credentials, cookies, and session IDs from traffic passing a monitored interface. This version is a maintained fork of Dug Song's original, distributed as a static binary for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and run directly from the shell with options like promiscuous mode, port-agnostic deep-packet inspection, and banner display. It suits penetration testers and red teamers doing on-network credential harvesting or checking who is running SSLSSLA cryptographic protocol for encrypting network connections, now deprecated in favor of TLS but whose name persists colloquially. Cyber tools reference it when handling HTTPS or other encrypted-channel inspection and termination., SSH, or WireGuardWireGuardA modern VPN protocol and Linux kernel module, maintained as an open-source project, that establishes encrypted tunnels using minimal code and fast cryptography, giving cyber tools a lightweight, high-performance transport layer., including on non-default ports. The README lists PCredz and net-creds as similar tools. Its own history shows first commit in 2023, five contributors, and 26 commits in the past year, with the last release 280 days ago.
Enhanced fork of dsniff network sniffer with cookie logging, deep-packet inspection, and hidden command-line options.
How dsniff helps
Which credentials are crossing this network in plaintext right now?
inspects traffic on the monitored interface and extracts usernames, passwords, and session data as they pass, reporting each captured credential once rather than flooding the console with repeats
Which hosts are actually running SSL, SSH, or WireGuard, and where?
performs port-agnostic protocol detection on every packet so a service is identified by its actual behavior rather than its port number, surfacing admins hiding SSH or WireGuard on non-standard ports like 31337
What cookies or session IDs could let me hijack an active web session?
parses HTTP traffic to pull cookies and session identifiers out of the stream and logs them alongside the banner that produced them
Is this site quietly sending visitors to HTTPS in a way that leaks the initial request?
watches for plaintext HTTP redirect headers pointing to HTTPS and displays them, showing where the unencrypted first hop happened
Which of these captures are duplicates I can ignore versus new findings?
suppresses repeat results by default and only shows every result once, with an option to fall back to showing all matches when a full picture is needed
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
|---|
Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for dsniff, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail dsniff puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in hackerschoice/dsniff, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 3 +1 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 209 days issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 0 of 1 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 0
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 56
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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