Hping - Active Network Security Tool

hping is a command-line oriented TCP/IP packet assembler/analyzer. The interface is inspired to the ping(8) unix command, but hping isn't only able to send ICMP echo requests. It supports TCP, UDP, ICMP and RAW-IP protocols, has a traceroute mode, the ability to send files between a covered channel, and many other features.

While hping was mainly used as a security tool in the past, it can be used in many ways by people that don't care about security to test networks and hosts. A subset of the stuff you can do using hping:

• Firewall testing
• Advanced port scanning
• Network testing, using different protocols, TOS, fragmentation
• Manual path MTU discovery
• Advanced traceroute, under all the supported protocols
• Remote OS fingerprinting
• Remote uptime guessing
• TCP/IP stacks auditing
• hping can also be useful to students that are learning TCP/IP.

Hping works on the following unix-like systems: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, MacOs X, Windows.