This is experimental

This version is a successor to the _POSIX_C_SOURCE 200809L implementation in which all of the data of a parsed a pcap/pcapng files is written as a single and simple query. The ingestion result is rather fast (tested writes: 100*10^3 tcp packets in ~1.8 sec) but may be insecure.

The idea of this iteration is to use a prepared statement and chunk the data according to maximum input. Postgres databases have a custom maximum limit on each insert query of prepared statements. Said chunk size is initialized through the config/interface file called parser.json as insert_max. Data can be read from PCAP/PCANG files, as well as network devices.

The software is written in Rust (no unsafe mode). At the current state I am testing language features. The code should be modular enough to change any awfully written function. Error handling is subpar at the moment. There is no real unit testing to speak of.

Process is as follows:

• Choose between network device (which should be used as well) or file input
• Choosing device is straight forward -> data gets parsed, chunked and queries prepared according to insert_max size
• Encapsulation type / Linktype is chosen in beforehand
• Choosing file input means selecting a directory where your PCAP/PCAPNG files reside.
• A hash map is created out of key(paths):value(metadata) of the pcap files in the specified directory.
• The parser gets invoked, which itself calls the appropriate protocol handler on to the byte data of yielded packets. A vector of type QryData is returned after EOF has been hit.
• QryData vector is serialized.
• Serialized data gets chunked.
• Prepared statements are prepared according to chunksize
• Queried data gets queried in chunks afterwards

Currently, ethernet, IPv4, Ipv6, TCP, UDP and ARP/RARP network protocols are handled. Because of testing purposes, layout of the table is serialized json. Only procotols inside the packet are not null inside serialized json data. A query may look like this select packet from json_dump where packet->>'ipv4_header' is not null;

Speaking of serialization: After profiling it turns out that ~20% of cpu time is used for serialization to json. This, of course, could be saved completely.

Another subgoal was the ability to compile a static binary, which --last time I tested-- works but the need for libpcap itself. Everything else had no dependencies. It even executes on oracle linux, after linking against the elf64 interpreter directly. If you ever had the pleasure using this derivate it may come as a suprise to you. The key is to compile via x86_64-unknown-linux-musl target. See: https://doc.rust-lang.org/edition-guide/rust-2018/platform-and-target-support/musl-support-for-fully-static-binaries.html

If this whole thing turns out to be viable, some future features may be:

• Database containing file hash map to compare file status/sizes after the parser may have crashed, or to join a complete overview of any existing PCAP files.
• Concurrency. There are some interresting ways of parallelization I am working on to find a model that really benefits the use case. MPSC looks promising at the moment.
• Update file hashmap through inotify crate, during runtime.
• Restoration of fragmented ipv4 packages.
• SIMD (via autovectorization). Which is easy enough to do in Rust.

There are many other things left to be desired.

The file used for testing was identical to the one used in the previous C implementation. Inserting none chunked data resulted in ~20 minutes of querying to database. Chunked data is below 20 seconds after compiler optimization.

Speaking of optimization: Do yourself a favor an run release code not debug code: cargo run --release. The compiler does a rather hefty optimization and you will save some time waiting for your precious data do be inserted. I did no further optimization besides trying to enable the compiler to do a better job. Just blackboxing, no assembly tweaking yet.