Analysis of various packet sniffers: A study

Today everything is being centralized through a common dedicated network to ease its use, make it more user friendly and increase its efficiency. The size of these centric networks is also increasing rapidly. So the management, maintenance and monitoring of these networks is important to keep network smooth and improve economic efficiency. Packet sniffing or packet analysis is the process of capturing data passed over the local network and looking for any information that may be useful. There is a wide variety of packet sniffers available in the market that can be exploited for this purpose. This paper focuses on the basics of packet sniffer, its working principle and a comparative study of various packet sniffers.