Giuliano Bellini

Bellini’s October 2023 master’s dissertation at Politecnico di Torino describes Sniffnet’s origin in a network-analysis project. He continued developing it beyond the original assignment, including the documentation, maintenance and distribution needed for other people to use it. The dissertation also discusses his participation in GitHub Accelerator. That history helps explain the project’s focus on the whole application experience alongside the mechanics of packet capture.[3]

Making network activity understandable

Sniffnet lets a user choose a network adapter, filter traffic and inspect connections, bandwidth use and remote hosts. Its interface connects technical details such as services and network owners to a visual overview of activity. Current features include packet-capture import and export, program-level bandwidth information, custom notifications and IP blacklists. The application is written in Rust and available across major desktop operating systems. It aims to make network inspection approachable without requiring a user to start from a raw packet trace.[2]

The platform details behind a friendly interface

The listeners library associates open network ports with the processes listening on them. It wraps platform-specific system APIs and uses caching to make a small cross-platform interface available to Rust applications. Picon handles another platform detail: obtaining program icons. That library returns handles for the Iced UI framework because it was built for Sniffnet, so its documented scope is narrower than a general-purpose icon library. These components expose some of the work required to turn system information into an intelligible desktop view.[4][5]