Command Line Usage Overview

You can run PATHspider from the command line. In order for the Observer to work, you will need permissions to capture raw packets from the network interface. You may also need elevated privileges when generating traffic using raw sockets or to modify the local TCP/IP stack. This will require you to use sudo or equivalent in order to run PATHspider if you are not logged in as the root user.

# pspdr --help
usage: pspdr [-h] [--verbose] COMMAND ...

PATHspider will spider the paths.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --verbose   Enable verbose logging

Commands:
    filter    Pre-process a target list
    measure   Perform a PATHspider measurement
    observe   Passively observe network traffic
    test      Run the built in test suite

Spider safely!

Performing Active Measurement

PATHspider provides the “measure” command to perform active traffic generation and observation of that traffic for path transparency measurement. Based on the observations made, paths are assigned conditions such as ecn.connectivity.works indicating that the use of ECN does not cause connectivity impairment between the vantage point and the particular target.

It is possible to enable the output of flow records along with the derived observations using the --output-flows flag. This will generate considerably more output and so is disabled by default.

You may specify input and output files using flags, however by default these are set to be stdin and stdout and so you can, and are recommended to, use shell redirection instead. To see output as it is written to the file, you can pipe the output to tee to print it on the screen while also saving it to a file.

You will be required to set your interface name and PATHspider will not start if it detects that the chosen interface is not active.

# pspdr measure --help
usage: pspdr measure [-h] [-i INTERFACE] [-w WORKERS] [--input INPUTFILE]
                    [--output OUTPUTFILE] [--output-flows]
                    PLUGIN ...

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i INTERFACE, --interface INTERFACE
                        The interface to use for the observer. (Default: eth0)
  -w WORKERS, --workers WORKERS
                        Number of workers to use. (Default: 100)
  --input INPUTFILE     A file containing a list of PATHspider jobs. Defaults
                        to standard input.
  --output OUTPUTFILE   The file to output results data to. Defaults to
                        standard output.
  --output-flows        Include flow results in output.

Plugins:
  The following plugins are available for use:

   dscp                Differentiated Services Codepoints
   h2                  HTTP/2
   evilbit             Evil bit connectivity testing
   mss                 TCP Maximum Segment Size
   tfo                 TCP Fast Open
   dnsresolv           Simple Input List DNS Resolver
   ecn                 Explicit Congestion Notification
   udpzero             UDP Zero Checksum

Spider safely!

Quickstart Example

You can run a small study using the ECN plugin and the included webtest.ndjson file to measure path transparency to ECN for a small selection of web servers and save the results in results.ndjson (ensure to change the interface name to match an active interface on your machine):

pspdr measure -i eth0 ecn </usr/share/doc/pathspider/examples/webtest.ndjson >results.ndjson

Note

If you’ve not installed PATHspider from apt, you will find the webinput.ndjson example input file in the examples folder of the source distribution.

Performing Passive Observation

PATHspider provides the “observe” command to perform passive traffic observation for path transparency measurement. In this version of PATHspider we do not attempt to determine path conditions during passive observation, and instead only output flow records. This may change in future versions of PATHspider.

You can list the available chains with --list-chains and then select any number of chains that you would like to use. It is recommended that you include the basic chain as this will add the IP addresses and port numbers to the flow records.

You may specify the output file using a flag, however by default this is set to be /dev/stdout and so you can, and are recommended to, use shell redirection instead. To see output as it is written to the file, you can pipe the output to tee to print it on the screen while also saving it to a file. You will be required to set your interface name and PATHspider will not start if it detects that the chosen interface is not active.

It is also possible to perform offline analysis of a PCAP file using the “observe” command. Instead of an interface name, pass the name of the pcap file to -i instead. The PCAP file must have a .pcap extension to be recognised.

usage: pspdr observe [-h] [--list-chains] [-i INTERFACE] [--output OUTPUTFILE]
                     [chains [chains ...]]

positional arguments:
  chains                Observer chains to use

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --list-chains         Prints a list of available chains
  -i INTERFACE, --interface INTERFACE
                        The interface to use for the observer. (Default: eth0)
  --output OUTPUTFILE   The file to output results data to. Defaults to
                        standard output.

Quickstart Example

You can observe network traffic passively to perform observations without actively generating traffic. In this case no input file is needed.

pspdr observe -i eth0 basic tcp ecn >results.ndjson

Data Formats

PATHspider uses newline delimited JSON (ndjson) for both the input and output format. The ndjson format gives flexibility in the contents of the data as different tests may require data to remain associated with jobs so that it can be present in the final output (the Alexa ranking of a webserver, for example), or used as part of the test (running tests against authoritative DNS servers and needing to know a domain for which the server should be authoritative).

Input Format

At a minimum, each job should contain an IP address in a dip field. Depending on the plugin in use, more details may be required. Refer to the documentation for the specific plugin for more information.

Output Format

For each job, the output JSON dictionary will contain the original job information, a computed path using available information and a set of conditions seen for the path as generated by the plugins.

With --output-flows enabled, PATHspider’s output will include an additional field in the JSON dictionary for each job containing an array of flow records, one for each configuration. Usually one record will be for the baseline (A) connection, and one for the experimental (B) connection. These JSON records contain the original job information, any information added by the connection functions and any information added by the Observer.

Additionally, internal information may be retained:

Key	Description
config	0 for baseline, 1..n for experimental
spdr_state	0 = OK, 1 = TIMEOUT, 2 = FAILED, 3 = SKIPPED

For detail on the values in individual plugins, see the section for that plugin later in this documentation.