secdev/scapy

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

12501 stars · 2237 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Scapy is a powerful Python-based interactive packet manipulation program and library that can forge, decode, send, capture, and match packets across a wide range of protocols. It supports fast packet prototyping with sensible defaults and can replace many classic tools like hping, tcpdump, and parts of nmap and wireshark.

Use cases

• craft and send custom network packets from python
• sniff and capture packets and save them to pcap files
• perform network scans and discovery like arping or traceroute
• decode and analyze packets from a pcap capture
• send malformed or invalid frames for security testing
• inject custom 802.11 wifi frames
• prototype network protocols interactively in a shell

When to choose

• you need fine-grained control over packet construction or parsing in python
• you want one tool for scanning, sniffing, tracing, and packet forging
• you need to send nonstandard or invalid packets that other tools can't produce
• you want to script network experiments or security tests

When to avoid

• you need high-performance packet processing or production traffic analysis at scale
• you want a polished GUI for packet analysis like wireshark
• you need a simple high-level HTTP client rather than raw packet control

Facets

library · maturity stable

networking security cli developer-tools testing security networking developer-tools penetration-testing python windows bsd cli cross-platform packet-crafting packet-sniffer pcap network-discovery network-analysis packet-manipulation protocol-decoding linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="secdev/scapy")