Security Cipher
Home Blog About Us
Resources ▼
🗺️ Penetration Testing Roadmap 🌐 Web Application Security Checklist 🤖 OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 🧠 LLM AI Security Checklist 🛠️ Security Tools 🎯 Penetration Testing Tricks 📄 Secure Code Explain 📖 Vulnerability Explain ☁️ AWS Cloud Security Checklist
My Resume
Contact UsContact
← Security Tools View on GitHub

scapy

Interactive Python packet manipulation program for crafting, sniffing and forging packets.

Scapy   Scapy

Scapy unit tests Codecov Status Codacy Badge PyPI Version License: GPL v2 Join the chat at https://gitter.im/secdev/scapy

Scapy is a powerful Python-based interactive packet manipulation program and library.

It is able to forge or decode packets of a wide number of protocols, send them on the wire, capture them, store or read them using pcap files, match requests and replies, and much more. It is designed to allow fast packet prototyping by using default values that work.

It can easily handle most classical tasks like scanning, tracerouting, probing, unit tests, attacks or network discovery (it can replace hping, 85% of nmap, arpspoof, arp-sk, arping, tcpdump, wireshark, p0f, etc.). It also performs very well at a lot of other specific tasks that most other tools can't handle, like sending invalid frames, injecting your own 802.11 frames, combining techniques (VLAN hopping+ARP cache poisoning, VoIP decoding on WEP protected channel, ...), etc.

Scapy supports Python 3.7+. It's intended to be cross platform, and runs on many different platforms (Linux, OSX, *BSD, and Windows).

Getting started

Scapy is usable either as a shell or as a library. For further details, please head over to Getting started with Scapy, which is part of the documentation.

Shell demo

Scapy install demo

Scapy can easily be used as an interactive shell to interact with the network. The following example shows how to send an ICMP Echo Request message to github.com, then display the reply source IP address:

sudo ./run_scapy
Welcome to Scapy
>>> p = IP(dst="github.com")/ICMP()
>>> r = sr1(p)
Begin emission:
.Finished to send 1 packets.
*
Received 2 packets, got 1 answers, remaining 0 packets
>>> r[IP].src
'192.30.253.113'

Resources

The documentation contains more advanced use cases, and examples.

Other useful resources:

  • Scapy in 20 minutes
  • Interactive tutorial (part of the documentation)
  • The quick demo: an interactive session (some examples may be outdated)
  • HTTP/2 notebook
  • TLS notebooks

Installation

Scapy works without any external Python modules on Linux and BSD like operating systems. On Windows, you need to install some mandatory dependencies as described in the documentation.

On most systems, using Scapy is as simple as running the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/secdev/scapy
cd scapy
./run_scapy

To benefit from all Scapy features, such as plotting, you might want to install Python modules, such as matplotlib or cryptography. See the documentation and follow the instructions to install them.

Packaging status

Packaging status

License

Scapy's code, tests and tools are licensed under GPL v2. The documentation (everything unless marked otherwise in doc/, and except the logo) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.5.

Contributing

Want to contribute? Great! Please take a few minutes to read this!

Press Escape to close the search panel.

Donate

Buy me a Coffee

Penetration Testing Services - Fiverr

Buy me a Coffee

Penetration Testing Services

penetration Testing Services

Web Application Security Quiz

Web Application Security Quiz

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups - Twitter

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups

Download our Latest Android Application

Guide for Penetration Testing

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups - Telegram

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups

Author

Piyush
Senior Product Security Engineer

Ethical Hacker || Penetration Tester || Gamer || Blogger || Application Security Engineer

READ ARTICLE

Donate

Buy me a Coffee

Recent Posts

  • Software Supply Chain Security in 2026: Packages, Pipelines, and Provenance
    Software Supply Chain Security in 2026: Packages, Pipelines, and Provenance
    August 10, 2026/
    0 Comments
  • I Ran Codex Security on a Shop API Lab: 14 Bugs, $1.64, Full Playbook
    I Ran Codex Security on a Shop API Lab: 14 Bugs, $1.64, Full Playbook
    August 3, 2026/
    0 Comments
  • How I Would Hack Your Startup in 24 Hours (Real-World Pentest Guide)
    How I Would Hack Your Startup in 24 Hours (Real-World Pentest Guide)
    July 27, 2026/
    0 Comments

Follow Us

SecurityCipher

Practical security guides, vulnerability deep-dives, and hands-on resources for bug bounty hunters and penetration testers.

Useful Links

  • Start Here
  • Cybersecurity Jobs
  • CVE Lookup
  • Bug Bounty Programs
  • Security Conferences
  • Payload Cheatsheets
  • Interview Prep
  • Report Templates
  • Blogs
  • About
  • Contact
  • RSS Feed

Recent Post

  • Software Supply Chain Security in 2026: Packages, Pipelines, and Provenance
  • I Ran Codex Security on a Shop API Lab: 14 Bugs, $1.64, Full Playbook
  • How I Would Hack Your Startup in 24 Hours (Real-World Pentest Guide)
© 2026 SecurityCipher. All rights reserved. Privacy Policies · Terms & Conditions