Saving locally an altered packet

Question

I'm trying to develop a software in which I'm capturing packets from my network interface, changing them, and writing the altered packets to my local disc (to an output file).

Thing is, when I open the output file, I see that the changes that I made were not committed. for example, I've captured an IP packet and changed the source ip address to be 0.0.0.0. Afterwards, I've saved the altered packet in the output file. When I've opened the output file, I've seen that the source ip address was the same as it was before I have changed it.

    if (packet instanceof TCPPacket) {
            try {   
                ((IPPacket)packet).src_ip = InetAddress.getByName("0.0.0.0");

            } catch (UnknownHostException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            System.out.println(packet);
            outputFile.writePacket(packet);             
     }

What am I missing?

Answer 1

The thing about the JpcapWriter is that it runs alongside the JpcapCaptor, which is why you need to give it a captor as a field when it is initialized. So as you loop through the captor and grab the packets, even if you make changes to it, those changes are only stored within the object you create in java, and the captor passes the unaltered packet to the writer.

I encountered a similar problem. So I just write the packets to a file without using the built in writer. I extract the data I want and write it as plain text. The only downside to this is that it makes reloading the capture file a bit trickier.

Let me know if you have any more questions.