Help Wanted#

Important

This is a copy of the discussion thread started on the GitHub. The documentation is only used as a backup reference to the original discussion thread.

As PyPCAPKit reaches its 16k lines of code and 800th commit, I figure it would be a better idea to record the project enchancement proposals here in the discussion thread. The proposals and/or notes will be documented and maintained here.

Pull requests for the existing proposals and any new ideas are highly welcomed and encouraged. Should you have any questions, please leave a note either in this thread or under the Q&A category discussions.

Wish you enjoy PyPCAPKit!!!

More Protocols, More!!!#

As you may have noticed, there are some protocol-named files under the NotImplemented folders. These protocols are what I planned to implement but not yet done. Namely, grouped by each TCP/IP layer and ordered by protocol name alphabetically,

  • Link Layer: DSL, EAPOL, FDDI, ISDN, PPP

  • Internet Layer: ECN, ESP, ICMP, ICMPv6, IGMP, NDP, Shim6

  • Transport Layer: DCCP, QUIC, RSVP, SCTP

  • Application Layer: BGP, DHCP, DHCPv6, DNS, IMAP, LDAP, MQTT, NNTP, NTP, ONC/RPC, POP, RIP, RTP, SIP, SMTP, SNMP, SSH, Telnet, TLS/SSL, XMPP

Specifically, I have attempted to implement ESP several years ago, and I abandoned the implementation in the NotImplemented folder due to some design flaws within PyPCAPKit at that time. But now, the protocol should be able to implement quite smoothly.

More over, MH requires some help to implement all the message data types, you can find more information in the specific file.

Logging Integration#

As PyPCAPKit now has the pcapkit.utilities.logging.logger in place, I’m expecting to fully extend its functionality in the entire module. Ideas and contributions are welcomed to integrate the logging system into PyPCAPKit.

New Engines#

Although PyPCAPKit already has support for some popular PCAP parsing libraries, I’m expecting to extend the list of supported engines furthermore. The candidate engines include:

Implementation for support of new engines would include adding corresponding handler methods and code blocks into pcapkit.foundation.extraction.Extractor (see support for Scapy, DPKT, and/or PyShark), as well as, the unified auxiliary tools located in pcapkit.toolkit.

Test Cases#

PyPCAPKit still does not have a systematic testing suite to be bundled with it. The only test cases I have worked out are those in the /tests folder - mostly functional tests. As PyPCAPKit is growing bigger and bigger, a comprehensive test suite is coming much more of demand for a more reliable development process.