aschaap / picosnitch

A small program for notifying you whenever a program makes its first network connection

picosnitch

• An ultra lightweight program for linux that monitors your system and notifies you whenever it sees a new program that connects to the network
• Or when the sha256 changes for one of those programs (can also check VirusTotal)
• And features a curses based UI for browsing past connections
• Inspired by programs such as GlassWire, Little Snitch, and OpenSnitch

getting started

installation

• install from PyPI with
  pip3 install picosnitch[full] --upgrade --user
• depends on the BPF Compiler Collection (e.g. for Ubuntu)
  sudo apt install python3-bpfcc

usage

• run daemon with
  picosnitch start
• stop daemon with
  picosnitch stop
• view past connections with
  picosnitch view

configuration

• config and list of seen processes are stored in ~/.config/picosnitch/snitch.json
• stop picosnitch if it is currently running before making any edits otherwise your changes will be lost

{
  "Config": {
    "DB write min (sec)": 1, # Minimum time (seconds) between writing logs to snitch.db
    "Keep logs (days)": 365, # How many days to keep connection logs
    "Log command lines": True, # Log command line args for each executable
    "Log remote address": True, # Log remote addresses for each executable
    "Log ignore": [80, "chrome", "firefox"], # List of process names (str) or ports (int)
    # will omit connections that match any of these from the connection log (snitch.db)
    # the process and executable will still be recorded in snitch.json
    "VT API key": "", # API key for VirusTotal, leave blank to disable
    "VT file upload": False, # Only hashes are uploaded by default
    "VT limit request": 15 # Number of seconds between requests
  },
  "Latest Entries": [], # Log of entries by time
  "Names": {}, # Log of processes by name containing respective executable(s)
  "Processes": {}, # Log of processes by executable containing respective name(s)
  "SHA256": {} # Log of processes by executable containing sha256 hash(es) and VirusTotal results
}

• the connection log is stored in ~/.config/picosnitch/snitch.db
• the error log is stored in ~/.config/picosnitch/error.log

building from source

• install from source using python 3 with
  python setup.py install --user
• required dependencies (installed automatically from PyPI on setup if not already present)
  plyer psutil vt-py
• additional dependency (requires manual installation)
  bcc