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emanuele-f/PCAPdroid

No-root network monitor, firewall and PCAP dumper for Android

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README.md

# PCAPdroid

PCAPdroid is a privacy-friendly open source app which can track, analyze and block the connections made by the other apps on the device. It can also export a PCAP dump of the traffic, inspect HTTP requests, decrypt TLS traffic and much more.

PCAPdroid simulates a VPN in order to capture the network traffic without root. It does not use a remote VPN server, instead data is processed locally on the device.

Main features:

- Log and analyze the connections made by user and system apps
- Get a summary of how much data each app sent and received
- Low battery usage for continuous, all-day capture
- Extract hosts and IP addresses from DNS, TLS and HTTP
- Record the traffic to PCAP files with additional app metadata
- Send traffic via PCAP-over-IP for real-time analysis (e.g. on Wireshark)
- Decrypt the HTTPS/TLS traffic, extract the URLs and save the SSLKEYLOGFILE
- Inspect the HTTP requests/replies and export them to HAR
- Identify the country and ASN of the remote server via offline DB lookups
- On rooted devices, capture the traffic while other VPN apps are running

Paid features:

- [Firewall](https://emanuele-f.github.io/PCAPdroid/paid_features#51-firewall): create rules to block individual apps, domains and IP addresses
- [Malware detection](https://emanuele-f.github.io/PCAPdroid/paid_features#52-malware-detection): detect malicious connections by using third-party blacklists
- [PCAPng format](https://emanuele-f.github.io/PCAPdroid/paid_features#53-pcapng-format): makes it easier to export and analyze decrypted traffic

If you plan to use PCAPdroid to perform packet analysis, check out <a href='https://emanuele-f.github.io/PCAPdroid/quick_start#14-packet-analysis'>the specific section</a> of the manual.

You can test the latest features before the official release by adding the [Beta repository](https://pcapdroid.org/fdroid/repo/) to the F-Droid app.

## User Guide

Check out the [quick start instructions](https://emanuele-f.github.io/PCAPdroid/quick_start) or the full [User Guide](https://emanuele-f.github.io/PCAPdroid).

## Sponsors

The PCAPdroid project is sponsored by [AVEQ GmbH](https://aveq.info).

If you want to sponsor this project [drop me an email](mailto:black.silver@hotmail.it?subject=PCAPdroid%20sponsorship).

## Community

You can help the PCAPdroid project in many ways:

- [Make a donation](https://emanuele-f.github.io/PCAPdroid/donate)
- Translate the app on [Weblate](https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/pcapdroid/)
<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/pcapdroid/">
  <img src="https://hosted.weblate.org/widgets/pcapdroid/-/app/multi-auto.svg" alt="Translation status" />
</a>

- [Discuss](https://github.com/emanuele-f/PCAPdroid/discussions) new features
- Improve the app theme and layout
- Star the project on Github and on [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emanuelef.remote_capture)
- Of course provide code pull requests!

Join the international PCAPdroid community [on Telegram](https://t.me/PCAPdroid) or [on Matrix](https://matrix.to/#/#pcapdroid:matrix.org).

## Integrating into your APP

Some features of PCAPdroid can be integrated into a third-party app to provide packet capture capabilities.

- For rooted devices, the [pcapd daemon](https://github.com/emanuele-f/PCAPdroid/tree/master/app/src/main/jni/pcapd) can be directly integrated into your APK to capture network packets.
- For all the devices, PCAPdroid [exposes an API](https://github.com/emanuele-f/PCAPdroid/blob/master/docs/app_api.md) to control the packet capture and send the captured packets via UDP to your app. This requires to install PCAPdroid along with your app.

## Open Source

PCAPdroid is powered by open source technologies.

- [nDPI](https://github.com/ntop/nDPI): deep packet inspection library, provides the connections metadata
- [mitmproxy](https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy): a local proxy for the TLS decryption
- [zdtun](https://github.com/emanuele-f/zdtun): minimal TCP/IP stack for the non-root capture

For the complete list of third party libraries check out the "About" page in the app.

## Building

1. On Windows, install [gitforwindows](https://gitforwindows.org)
2. Clone this repo
3. Inside the repo dir, run `git submodule update --init`. The `submodules` directory should get populated.
4. Open the project in Android Studio, install the appropriate SDK and the NDK
5. Build the app

*Note*: If you get "No valid CMake executable was found", be sure to install the CMake version used by PCAPdroid (currently [3.22.1](https://github.com/emanuele-f/PCAPdroid/blob/master/app/build.gradle)) from the SDK manager

Repository info

Default branch: master
Latest version: v2.0.2
Created: 2020-01-07
Last activity: 2026-09-26
License: GPL-3.0
Open issues: 42
Watchers: 64

Topics

android capture-traffic decryption firewall network-analysis no-root pcap pcap-files sniffer sniffing traffic-monitor wireshark

Contributors

emanuele-f

1.4k contributions

sr093906

31 contributions

dmnsea

26 contributions

oersen

25 contributions

TacoTheDank

8 contributions