ETTER.CONF(5)ETTER.CONF(5)NAMEetter.conf - Ettercap configuration file
DESCRIPTIONetter.conf is the configuration file that determines ettercap behav‐
iour. It is always loaded at startup and it configures some attributes
used at runtime.
The file contains entries of the form:
[section]
entry = value
...
Each entry defines a variable that can be customized. Every value MUST
be an integer. Sections are used only to group together some variables.
NOTE: if you omit a variable in the conf file, it will be initialized
with the value 0. It is strongly discouraged to not initialize critical
variables such as "arp_poison_delay" or "connection_timeout".
The following is a list of available variables:
[privs]
ec_uid This variable specifies the UID to which privileges
are dropped at startup. After the socket at link
layer has been opened the privileges are dropped to
a specific uid different from root for security
reasons. etter.conf is the only file that is read
with root privs. Be sure that the specified uid has
enough privs to read other files (etter.*) You can
bypass this variable by setting the environment
variable EC_UID.
[mitm]
arp_storm_delay The value represents the milliseconds to wait
between two consecutive packets during the initial
ARP scan. You can increment this value to be less
aggressive at startup. The randomized scan plus a
high delay can fool some types of ARP scan detec‐
tors.
arp_poison_smart With this variable set, only 3 inital poisoned ARP
messages are sent to the victims. This poisoned
status is kept up by ettercap with responding to
ARP requests from victims that want to refresh
their ARP cache. This makes the ARP poisoning very
stealthy but may be unreliable on shared media such
as WiFi.
arp_poison_warm_up When the poisoning process starts, the inter-packet
delay is low for the first 5 poisons (to be sure
the poisoning process has been successful). After
the first 5 poisons, the delay is incremented (to
keep up the poisoning). This variable controls the
delay for the first 5 poisons. The value is in sec‐
onds.
The same delay is used when the victims are
restored to the original associations (RE-ARPing)
when ettercap is closed.
arp_poison_delay This variable controls the poisoning delay after
the first 5 poisons. The value is expressed in sec‐
onds. You can increase this value (to try to fool
the IDS) up to the timeout of the ARP cache (which
depends on the poisoned operating system).
arp_poison_icmp Enable the sending of a spoofed ICMP message to
force the targets to make an arp request. This will
create an arp entry in the host cache, so ettercap
will be able to win the race condition and poison
the target. Useful against targets that do not
accept gratuitous arp if the entry is not in the
cache.
arp_poison_reply Use ARP replies to poison the targets. This is the
classic attack.
arp_poison_request Use ARP request to poison the targets. Useful
against targets that cache even arp request values.
arp_poison_equal_mac
Set this option to 0 if you want to skip the poi‐
soning of two hosts with the same mac address. This
may happen if a NIC has one or more aliases on the
same network.
dhcp_lease_time This is the lease time (in seconds) for a dhcp
assignment. You can lower this value to permit the
victims to receive a correct dhcp reply after you
have stopped your attack. Using higher timeouts can
seriously mess up your network after the attack has
finished. On the other hand some clients will pre‐
fer a higher lease time, so you have to increase it
to win the race condition against the real server.
port_steal_delay This is the delay time (in milliseconds) between
stealing packets for the "port" mitm method. With
low delays you will be able to intercept more pack‐
ets, but you will generate more traffic. You have
to tune this value in order to find a good balance
between the number of intercepted packets, re-
transmitted packets and lost packets. This value
depends on full/half duplex channels, network driv‐
ers and adapters, network general configuration and
hardware.
port_steal_send_delay
This is the delay time (in microseconds) between
packets when the "port" mitm method has to re-send
packets queues. As said for port_steal_delay you
have to tune this option to the lowest acceptable
value.
ndp_poison_warm_up This option operates similar to the arp_poi‐
son_warm_up option. When the poisoning process
starts, this option controls the NDP poison delay
for the first 5 poisons (to be sure the poisoning
process has been successful). After the first 5
poisons, the delay is incremented (to keep up the
poisoning). This variable controls the delay for
the first 5 poisons. The value should be lower than
the ndp_poison_delay. The value is in seconds.
The same delay is used when the victims are
restored to the original associations
when ettercap is closed.
ndp_poison_delay This option is similar to the arp_poison_delay
option. It controls the delay in seconds for send‐
ing out the poisoned NDP packets to poison victim's
neighbor cache. This value may be increased to hide
from IDSs. But increasing the value increases as
well the probability for failing race conditions
during neighbor discovery and to miss some packets.
ndp_poison_send_delay
This option controls the delay in microseconds
between poisoned NDP packets are sent. This value
may be increased to hide from IDSs. But increasing
the value increases as well the probability for
failing race conditions during neighbor discovery
and to miss some packets.
ndp_poison_icmp Enable the sending of a spoofed ICMPv6 message to
motivate the targets to perform neighbor discovery.
This will create an entry in the host neighbor
cache, so ettercap will be able to win the race
condition and poison the target. Useful against
targets that do not accept neighbor advertisements
if the entry is not in the cache.
ndp_poison_equal_mac
Set this option to 0 if you want to skip the NDP
poisoning of two hosts with the same mac address.
This may happen if a NIC has one or more aliases on
the same network.
icmp6_probe_delay This option defines the time in seconds ettercap
waits for active IPv6 nodes to respond to the ICMP
probes. Decreasing this value could lead to miss
replies from active IPv6 nodes, hence miss them in
the host list. Increasing the value usually has no
impact; normally nodes can manage to answer during
the default delay.
NOTE: The ndp and icmp6 options are only available
if ettercap has been built with IPv6 support
[connections]
connection_timeout Every time a new connection is discovered, ettercap
allocates the needed structures. After a customiza‐
ble timeout, you can free these structures to keep
the memory usage low. This variable represents this
timeout. The value is expressed in seconds. This
timeout is applied even to the session tracking
system (the protocol state machine for dissectors).
connection_idle The number of seconds to wait before a connection
is marked as IDLE.
connection_buffer This variable controls the size of the buffer
linked to each connection. Every sniffed packet is
added to the buffer and when the buffer is full the
older packets are deleted to make room for newer
ones. This buffer is useful to view data that went
on the cable before you select and view a specific
connection. The higher this value, the higher the
ettercap memory occupation. By the way, the buffer
is dynamic, so if you set a buffer of 100.000 byte
it is not allocated all together at the first
packet of a connection, but it is filled as packets
arrive.
connect_timeout The timeout in seconds when using the connect()
syscall. Increase it if you get a "Connection time‐
out" error. This option has nothing to do with con‐
nections sniffed by ettercap. It is a timeout for
the connections made by ettercap to other hosts
(for example when fingerprinting remote host).
[stats]
sampling_rate Ettercap keeps some statistics on the processing
time of the bottom half (the sniffer) and top half
(the protocol decoder). These statistics are made
on the average processing time of sampling_rate
packets. You can decrease this value to have a more
accurate real-time picture of processing time or
increase it to have a smoother picture. The total
average will not change, but the worst value will
be heavily influenced by this value.
[misc]
close_on_eof When reading from a dump file and using console or
daemon UI, this variable is used to determine what
action has to be done on EOF. It is a boolean
value. If set to 1 ettercap will close itself (use‐
ful in scripts). Otherwise the session will con‐
tinue waiting for user input.
store_profiles Ettercap collects in memory a profile for each host
it detects. Users and passwords are collected
there. If you want to run ettercap in background
logging all the traffic, you may want to disable
the collecting in memory to save system memory. Set
this option to 0 (zero) to disable profiles collec‐
tion. A value of 1 will enable collection for all
the hosts, 2 will collect only local hosts and 3
only remote hosts (a host is considered remote if
it does not belong to the netmask).
aggressive_dissectors
Some dissectors (such as SSH and HTTPS) need to
modify the payload of the packets in order to col‐
lect passwords and perform a decryption attack. If
you want to disable the "dangerous" dissectors all
together, set this value to 0.
skip_forwarded If you set this value to 0 you will sniff even
packets forwarded by ettercap or by the kernel. It
will generate duplicate packets in conjunction with
the arp mitm method (for example). It could be use‐
ful while running ettercap in unoffensive mode on a
host with more than one network interface (waiting
for the multiple-interface feature...)
checksum_warning If you set the value to 0 the messages about incor‐
rect checksums will not be displayed in the user
messages windows (nor logged to a file with -m).
Note that this option will not disable the check on
the packets, but only prevent the message to be
displayed (see below).
checksum_check This option is used to completely disable the check
on the checksum of the packets that ettercap
receives. The check on the packets is performed to
avoid ettercap spotting thru bad checsum packets
(see Phrack 60.12). If you disable the check, you
will be able to sniff even bad checksummed packet,
but you will be spotted if someone is searching for
you...
[dissectors]
protocol_name This value represents the port on which the proto‐
col dissector has to be bound. A value of 0 will
disable the dissector. The name of the variable is
the same of the protocol name. You can specify a
non standard port for each dissector as well as
multiple ports. The syntax for multiport selection
is the following: port1,port2,port3,...
NOTE: some dissectors are conditionally compiled .
This means that depending on the libraries found in
your system some dissectors will be enabled and
some others will not. By default etter.conf con‐
tains all supported dissectors. if you got a
"FATAL: Dissector "xxx" does not exists (etter.conf
line yy)" error, you have to comment out the yy
line in etter.conf.
[curses]
color You can customize the colors of the curses GUI.
Simply set a field to one of the following values
and look at the GUI aspect :)
Here is a list of values: 0 Black, 1 Red, 2 Green,
3 Yellow, 4 Blue, 5 Magenta, 6 Cyan, 7 White
[strings]
utf8_encoding specifies the encoding to be used while displaying
the packets in UTF-8 format. Use the `iconv
--list` command for a list of supported encodings.
remote_broswer This command is executed by the remote_browser
plugin each time it catches a good URL request into
an HTTP connection. The command should be able to
get 2 parameters:
%host the Host: tag in the HTTP header. Used to
create the full request into the browser.
%url The page requested inside the GET request.
redir_command_on You must provide a valid command (or script) to
enable tcp redirection at the kernel level in order
to be able to use SSL dissection. Your script
should be able to get 3 parameters:
%iface The network interface on which the rule must
be set
%port The source port of the packets to be redi‐
rected (443 for HTTPS, 993 for imaps, etc).
%rport The internally bound port to which ettercap
listens for connections.
NOTE: this script is executed with an execve(), so you cannot use pipes
or output redirection as if you were in a shell. We suggest you to make
a script if you need those commands.
redir_command_off This script is used to remove the redirect rules
applied by 'redir_command_on'. You should note
that this script is called atexit() and thus it has
not high privileges. You should provide a setuid
program or set ec_uid to 0 in order to be sure that
the script is executed successfully.
ORIGINAL AUTHORS
Alberto Ornaghi (ALoR) <alor@users.sf.net>
Marco Valleri (NaGA) <naga@antifork.org>
PROJECT STEWARDS
Emilio Escobar (exfil) <eescobar@gmail.com>
Eric Milam (Brav0Hax) <jbrav.hax@gmail.com>
OFFICIAL DEVELOPERS
Mike Ryan (justfalter) <falter@gmail.com>
Gianfranco Costamagna (LocutusOfBorg) <costamagnagianfranco@yahoo.it>
Antonio Collarino (sniper) <anto.collarino@gmail.com>
Ryan Linn <sussuro@happypacket.net>
Jacob Baines <baines.jacob@gmail.com>
CONTRIBUTORS
Dhiru Kholia (kholia) <dhiru@openwall.com>
Alexander Koeppe (koeppea) <format_c@online.de>
Martin Bos (PureHate) <purehate@backtrack.com>
Enrique Sanchez
Gisle Vanem <giva@bgnett.no>
Johannes Bauer <JohannesBauer@gmx.de>
Daten (Bryan Schneiders) <daten@dnetc.org>
SEE ALSOettercap(8)ettercap_curses(8)ettercap_plugins(8)etterlog(8) etter‐
filter(8)ettercap-pkexec(8)ettercap 0.8.2ETTER.CONF(5)
