Packet visualization with Python
September 13th, 2009
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A long-time pet project of mine is decoding the network protocol of Valve Software’s “Source” game engine, used in Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead. I’ve never made it very far, but it has led me down some interesting paths in reverse engineering, debugging, and visualization. One example of the latter is this Python script I wrote to analyze a series of packets. It creates an image in which each row represents a packet, and each pixel represents one byte of the packet. The pixels range from black (for a value of 0×00) to bright green (0xFF). I got the idea from Greg Conti in his interview on the Network Security Podcast. Here’s what I did:
Categories: Visualization
