ARP Tools

ARP Tools is a collection of ARP utilities built on top of the libnet and libpcap libraries. The project currently contains three tools: ARP Discover (arpdiscover), an Ethernet scanner that leverages the ARP protocol; ARP Flood (arpflood), an ARP request flooder; and ARP Poison (arppoison), a tool for poisoning switches' MAC address tables.

ARP Discover is an Ethernet scanner that can be executed by running the following command:

$ ./arpdiscover 1st_dst_ip amount [interface]

Users can specify the first destination IP address and the amount of addresses to scan. The optional interface parameter can be used to specify the network interface to use. An example usage of this tool is demonstrated below:

$ sudo ./arpdiscover 10.19.83.1 5

After execution, the tool provides information about the user's hardware and IP address alongside the BPF filter. It then starts a sniffer and sends an ARP request to each IP address within the given range.

What's new in the latest ARP Tools release is the fix of a race condition within the arpdiscover tool. Overall, ARP Tools is a useful toolset for networking professionals who need to scan Ethernet networks, perform ARP request flooding, or poison switches' MAC addresses.