Watching the Internet Talk: A Beginner’s Packet Sniffer in Python
In this project, I built a lightweight packet sniffer using Python and the Scapy library to capture and inspect live network traffic at the transport and network layers. The goal was to understand, from first principles, how data flows through a system when it connects to the internet. By parsing IP, TCP, UDP, and ICMP packets in real-time, the tool reveals exactly who your machine is talking to, over which ports and protocols, and at what stage of communication—handshake, data transfer, or teardown. It’s a raw, low-level window into the internet’s pulse, built entirely from scratch for educational exploration.
