PacketSafari

Open Source

PacketSafari is built on top of open source software. The most important dependency for deep packet inspection is Wireshark (and its headless components such as sharkd).

Our Wireshark fork

To support PacketSafari's server-side analysis workflows, we maintain a public fork of Wireshark with PacketSafari-specific enhancements:

This fork focuses primarily on making sharkd more capable and predictable for large captures, automation, and browser-driven workflows (JSON-RPC, batch operations, and performance-sensitive queries).

Highlights of our sharkd enhancements

The changes in our fork include (non-exhaustive):

  • Capture loading controls and progress updates designed for large PCAPs (including streamed progress messages and faster selective dissection paths).
  • Expanded JSON-RPC API surface for analysis workflows, including framerange, decodeas, load_colorrules, and grep.
  • Richer, more structured JSON output for frames and columns (including totals, capture size/limits, and more stable typing for numeric column values).
  • Coloring rule improvements for multi-match evaluation and downstream statistics (including the frame.colorrules_matched field and rule match counters).
  • Practical CLI/export additions used by PacketSafari tooling (including enhanced bulk export support and capture processing flags).

Some of these enhancements are also mirrored in the PacketSafari source tree (for example the vendored sharkd sources under sharkd/).

Related open source tooling

PacketSafari also builds on anoncap, our capture anonymization tool for creating anonymized sibling captures while keeping the trace useful for analysis.

If you want the product-side workflow and current behavior, see How to anonymize a PCAP.

License and attribution

Wireshark is licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later (see the SPDX headers in the Wireshark sources, e.g. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later).

In compliance with the Wireshark license, we publish our modifications and make the corresponding source code available in our public fork above.

Thank you

We are grateful to the Wireshark project and its contributors. PacketSafari would not be possible without the decades of work that went into Wireshark, its dissectors, and the surrounding ecosystem.