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Open Packet Broker

Open Packet Broker

Hardware-grade network packet broker with a web UI — fully open source.
Capture, filter, manipulate, mirror, load-balance and forward packets between interfaces, driven by rules. A Go control plane on top of a C data plane (libpcap · AF_XDP · DPDK).

MIT Go C Web UI

Open Packet Broker started as a single-file C tool and has grown into a full software packet broker: a C data plane that captures, matches and forwards at speed, and a Go web UI that manages the rules, topology and monitoring. It does what a commercial hardware NPB does — filtering, VLAN manipulation, SPAN mirroring, load balancing, SSL inspection and deduplication — on plain Linux or embedded ARM, with no appliance and no vendor lock-in.

Screenshots

Dashboard (dark theme) Dashboard (light theme)

Dashboard — broker status, CPU/memory, live traffic, per-port stats and recent activity. Dark & light themes.

Rules & Topology New connection builder

Rules & Topology — a drag-to-connect 24-port diagram and a rule builder for mirror / SSL-chain / load-balance connections, with live filtering, VLAN and rate-limit options.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   Web UI (Go)                    │
│  :8005  │  Auth, Rules, Topology, Monitoring     │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│         C Data Plane (libpcap / AF_XDP / DPDK)   │
│   Packet capture → Rule matching → Forwarding    │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│               Linux / Embedded ARM               │
│           Network interfaces (eth0..ethN)        │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The Go control plane is pure-Go (CGO-free, embedded SQLite); the C data plane is a standalone binary the UI supervises — pick libpcap (portable), AF_XDP (zero-copy fast path), or DPDK.

Features

Category Features
Core Rule-based forwarding, 24-port topology (drag-to-connect SVG), priority ordering, enable/disable, dynamic rule reload
Filtering Protocol, port, IP (CIDR), MAC, TCP flags, VLAN, string match, full BPF, exclude rules
Manipulation VLAN add/remove/change, packet truncation / slicing
Mirroring 1:N SPAN — copy traffic to multiple tool ports
Load Balancing Round-robin / 5-tuple hash port groups
SSL Inspection Routing chains: encrypted → decrypt tool → reinject
Deduplication CRC32 hash-based duplicate removal
Rate Limiting Per-rule token bucket (Mbps + PPS)
PCAP Capture Start/stop capture, download .pcap files
Monitoring Port stats, link status, threshold alerts, webhook notifications
Health Checks Auto-disable rules when tool ports go down
SIEM Syslog forwarding (RFC 5424, UDP/TCP, CEF)
Security Bcrypt auth, CSRF, rate limiting, RBAC, 2FA/TOTP, audit log
Management Config backup/restore, firmware update, cluster mode, i18n

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/kdrypr/Open-Packet-Broker
cd Open-Packet-Broker

# 1 — control plane (pure Go, no CGO)
go build ./cmd/packet-broker

# 2 — C data plane (Linux; needs libpcap-dev)
gcc -O2 -o packet_broker c_src/packet_broker_libpcap.c -lpcap -lpthread

#     optional AF_XDP zero-copy path (needs clang + libbpf-dev + libxdp-dev):
# clang -O2 -o packet_broker_afxdp c_src/packet_broker_afxdp.c c_src/bpf_helpers.c -lpcap -lbpf -lxdp

# 3 — run, then open the UI
sudo ./packet-broker
# → http://localhost:8005   (default login: admin / admin — change it)

ARM cross-compile

GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build ./cmd/packet-broker
aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc -O2 -o packet_broker c_src/packet_broker_libpcap.c -lpcap -lpthread

Deploy (systemd)

sudo cp deploy/packet-broker.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now packet-broker

Project Layout

cmd/packet-broker/   # entry point (web server + handlers)
cmd/keygen/          # optional license key tooling
internal/            # broker, capture, rules, mirror, portgroup, ssldecrypt,
                     # dedup, throttle, syslog, cluster, healthcheck, netstats,
                     # sysinfo, alerts, backup, auth, totp, auditlog, firmware…
templates/           # dark-theme server-rendered HTML UI
c_src/               # C data plane — libpcap + AF_XDP variants, fuzzers, load-test
deploy/              # systemd unit
docs/                # project website (GitHub Pages)

Website

A landing page lives in docs/ and can be published with GitHub Pages (Settings → Pages → Source: main / /docs).

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome — this is MIT-licensed and meant to be hacked on. The C data plane and the Go control plane are cleanly separated, so you can extend either side independently.

License

MIT © kdrypr. Free to use, modify and self-host.