anevicon


A high-performant traffic generator, designed to be as convenient and reliable as it is possible. It sends numerous UDP packets to a server, thereby simulating an activity that can be produced by your end users or a group of hackers.

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Table of contents

Advantages

Disadvantages

Installation

Building from crates.io

bash $ cargo install anevicon

Building from sources

bash $ git clone https://github.com/Gymmasssorla/anevicon.git $ cd anevicon $ cargo build --release

Pre-compiled binaries

bash $ wget https://github.com/Gymmasssorla/anevicon/releases/download/vX.X.X/anevicon-x86_64-linux $ chmod a+x anevicon-x86_64-linux

Usage

Flags

Name | Explanation -----|------------ -b, --allow-broadcast| Allow sockets to send packets to a broadcast address specified using the --receiver option -h, --help | Prints help information --select-if | Displays an interactive menu of network interfaces to use. If unset, a default one will be used -V, --version | Prints version information

Options

Name | Value | Default | Explanation -----|-------|---------|------------ --date-time-format | String | %X | A format for displaying local date and time in log messages. Type man strftime to see the format specification --ip-ttl | Unsigned integer | None | Specifies the IP_TTL value for all future sockets. Usually this value equals a number of routers that a packet can go through --random-packet | Positive integer | 32768 | Repeatedly send a random-generated packet with a specified bytes length -p, --packets-count | Positive integer | 18 '446 '744 '073 '709 '551 '615 | A count of packets for sending. When this limit is reached, then the program will exit --packets-per-syscall | Positive integer | 600 | A count of packets which the program will send using only one system call. After the operation completed, a test summary will have been printed -r, --receiver | Socket address | None | A receiver of generated traffic, specified as an IP-address and a port number, separated by a colon.

This option can be specified several times to identically test multiple receivers in parallel mode. -f, --send-file | Filename | None | Interpret the specified file content as a single packet and repeatedly send it to each receiver -m, --send-message | String | None | Interpret the specified UTF-8 encoded text message as a single packet and repeatedly send it to each receiver --send-periodicity | Time span | 0secs | A time interval between sendmmsg system calls. This option can be used to modify test intensity -t, --send-timeout | Time span | 10secs | A timeout of sending every single packet. If a timeout is reached, then a packet will be sent later -s, --sender | Socket address | 0.0.0.0:0 | A sender of generated traffic, specified as an IP-address and a port number, separated by a colon -d, --test-duration | Time span | 64years 64hours 64secs | A whole test duration. When this limit is reached, then the program will exit.

Exit might occur a few seconds later because of long sendmmsg system calls. For more precision, decrease the --packets-per-syscall value. -v, --verbosity | From 0 to 5 | 3 | Enable one of the possible verbosity levels. The zero level doesn't print anything, and the last level prints everything.

Note that specifying the 4 and 5 verbosity levels might decrease performance, do it only for debugging. -w, --wait | Time span | 5secs | A waiting time span before a test execution used to prevent a launch of an erroneous (unwanted) test

Overview

Minimal command

All you need is to provide the testing server address, which consists of an IP address and a port number, separated by the colon character. By default, all sending sockets will have your local address:

```bash

Test the 80 port of the example.com site using your local address

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 ```

Test intensity

In some situations, you don't need to transmit the maximum possible amount of packets, you might want to decrease the intensity of packets sending. To do so, there is one more straightforward option called --send-periodicity.

```bash

Test the example.com waiting for 270 microseconds after each sendmmsg syscall

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 --send-periodicity=270us ```

Multiple receivers

Anevicon also has the functionality to test multiple receivers in parallel mode, thereby distributing the load on your processor cores. To do so, just specify the --receiver option several times.

```bash

Test the 80 port of example.com and the 13 port of google.com in parallel

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 --receiver=216.58.207.78:13 ```

Network interfaces

There is also an ability to bind all future sockets to a specific network interface. Consider the --select-if flag, which displays an interactive menu of network interfaces in a command line:

```bash

Test example.com with a custom network interface using --select-if

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 --select-if ```

Exit conditions

Note that the command above might not work on your system due to the security reasons. To make your test deterministic, there are two end conditions called --test-duration and --packets-count (a test duration and a packets count, respectively):

```bash

Test the 80 port of the example.com site with the two limit options

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 --test-duration=3min --packets-count=7000 ```

Custom messages

By default, Anevicon will generate a random packet with a default size (32768). In some kinds of UDP-based tests, packet content makes sense, and this is how you can specify it using the --send-file or --send-message options:

```bash

Test the 80 port of example.com with the custom file 'message.txt'

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 --send-file="message.txt"

Test the 80 port of example.com with the custom text message

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 --send-message="How do you do?" ```

Also, you are able to specify one or more random packets with your own lengths using the --random-packet option. This example specifies two random-generated packets with the sizes 1454 and 29400:

```bash

Test the 80 port of example.com with two random packets

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 --random-packet=1454 --random-packet=29400 ```

Logging options

Consider specifying a custom verbosity level from 0 to 5 (inclusively), which is done by the --verbosity option. There is also the --date-time-format option which tells Anevicon to use your custom date-time format.

```bash

Use a custom date-time format and the last verbosity level

$ anevicon --receiver=64.233.165.113:80 --date-time-format="%F" --verbosity=5 ```

Different verbosity levels print different logging types. As you can see in the table below, the zero verbosity level prints nothing, and the last one prints everything. The levels in the middle print logs selectively:

| | Errors | Warnings | Notifications | Debugs | Traces | |-|--------|----------|---------------|--------|--------| | Zero (0) | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | | First (1) | ✔ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | | Second (2) | ✔ | ✔ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | | Third (3) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ❌ | ❌ | | Fourth (4) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ❌ | | Fifth (5) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |

Multiple messages

v5.2.0 introduced the multiple messages functionality, which means that you can specify several messages to be sent to a tested web server (but order is not guaranteed).

```bash

Test the 80 port of example.com with these messages:

1) A custom file "file.txt";

2) A text message "Hello, Pitty! You're my worst friend.";

3) A text message "Hello, Scott! This is just a test.";

4) A text message "Goodbye, Albret! You're my best friend.";

5) A random packet of 5355 bytes;

6) A random packet of 2222 bytes.

$ anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 \ --send-file="file.txt" \ --send-message "Hello, Pitty! You're my worst friend." \ --send-message "Hello, Scott! This is just a test." \ --send-message "Goodbye, Albert! You're my best friend." \ --random-packet=5355 \ --random-packet=2222 ```

Going deeper

Well, it's time to understand the internals of Anevicon. First, it constructs an iterator of N messages (specified by both --send-message, --send-file, and --random-packet), where N is a number of packets specified by --packets-count. Each of these packets is accepted by an optimized sending buffer.

An optimized sending buffer is a data structure representing a sending buffer which can contain M messages, where M is a number of packets transmitted per a sendmmsg system call. When this buffer is full, it flushes all its messages by (surprise!) sendmmsg, thereby providing much better performance than an ordinary buffer.

That is, Anevicon has been designed to minimize a number of system calls to your Linux kernel. Yes, we can instead use such libraries as netmap/PF_RING/DPDK, but then users might be confused with running Anevicon on their systems. Anyway, I think that sendmmsg provides pretty well performance for all needs.

Here is a visual demonstration of the described process. You enter anevicon --receiver=93.184.216.34:80 --packets-count=7 --send-message="First" --send-message="Second" --send-message="Third" --packets-per-syscall=3 and the program generates an iterator over ten messages that will be processed by an optimized sending buffer with the capacity of three:

Using as a library

This program simply sends four packets to http://example.com/. Now you can follow the official documentation to learn more about the anevicon_core abstractions.

(examples/minimal.rs) ```rust use std::net::UdpSocket;

use anevicon_core::{Tester, TestSummary};

fn main() { // Setup the socket connected to the example.com domain let socket = UdpSocket::bind("0.0.0.0:0").unwrap(); socket.connect("93.184.216.34:80").unwrap();

// Setup all the I/O vectors (messages) we want to send
let payload = &mut [
    (0, "Generals gathered in their masses".as_bytes()),
    (0, "Just like witches at black masses".as_bytes()),
    (0, "Evil minds that plot destruction".as_bytes()),
    (0, "Sorcerers of death's construction".as_bytes()),
];

// Send all the created messages using only one system call
let mut summary = TestSummary::default();
let mut tester = Tester::new(&socket, &mut summary);

println!(
    "The total packets sent: {}, the total seconds passed: {}",
    tester.send_multiple(payload).unwrap().packets_sent(),
    summary.time_passed().as_secs()
);

} ```

Contributing

You are always welcome for any contribution to this project! But before you start, you should read the appropriate document to know about the preferred development process and the basic communication rules.

Legal disclaimer

Anevicon was developed as a means of testing stress resistance of web servers, and not for hacking, that is, the author of the project IS NOT RESPONSIBLE for any damage caused by your use of his program.

Contacts

Temirkhan Myrzamadi <gymmasssorla@gmail.com> (the author)