Hping

hping is a free packet generator and analyzer for the TCP/IP protocol distributed by Salvatore Sanfilippo (also known as antirez). Hping is one of the de-facto tools for security auditing and testing of firewalls and networks, and was used to exploit the Idle Scan scanning technique (also invented by the hping author), and now implemented in the Nmap port scanner. The new version of hping, hping3, is scriptable using the Tcl language and implements an engine for string based, human readable description of TCP/IP packets, so that the programmer can write scripts related to low level TCP/IP packet manipulation and analysis in very short time.

Like most tools used in computer security, hping is useful to both system administrators and crackers (or script kiddies).

External links

• The Hping Home Page
• The Hping Wiki
• Idle Scanning Paper by the Nmap Author
• the Nmap port scanner. Nmap and Hping are often considered complementary one to the other