Welcome to IO Ninja
Your One-Stop Terminal Emulator, Protocol Analyzer & IO Monitor

IO Ninja is a professional all-in-one terminal emulator, sniffer, and protocol analyzer. IO Ninja is highly modular and has plugins for most transports and protocols you might come across — network (TCP, UDP, SSL, SSH, WebSockets, etc.), serial (RS-232, RS-485, I2C, SPI, Modbus RTU, etc.), and others (named & anonymous pipes, USB endpoints, J-Link RTT, etc.). IO Ninja is scriptable and allows you to generate packets programmatically, react to incoming packets and other IO events, and create non-standard protocol analyzers.

IO Ninja is your swiss-army knife for debugging communications and a must-have tool for network security experts, system administrators, and all developers who deal with network programming in their line of work.

User rating:  4.7
79 votes

IO Ninja Is Used At

2024-02-29

IO Ninja 5.5.1 is out!

Service release

2024-01-18

IO Ninja 5.5.0 is out!

Major release
  • New fast Regex Markup engine (based on a heavily modified fork of the Google RE2 library)
  • 100% accurate display of all UTF-8 continuation bytes, unprintable characters, and invalid or incomplete UTF-8 multi-byte sequences across line and page boundaries in the log and hex editor
  • New implementation of the Plain Text binary data view in log with accurate line wraps in the middle of invalid UTF-8 multi-byte sequences (no more overhangs!) and optional visibility of CR, LF, and Tab characters
  • New built-in Jancy type string_t (non-zero-terminated UTF-8 string slice) is now used instead of char const* for strings in all scripts
  • New implementation of the Jancy regex switch statement and regex match operator =~ (based on the very same fork of Google RE2)
  • Release of the Device Monitor for Linux (tdevmon-3.3.13) with support for the latest Linux kernels
  • Numerous critical fixes in various modules


See also

Hardware Sniffers


We proudly present you the three hardware sniffers for IO Ninja. These devices are simple yet functional and convenient sniffers for asynchronous serial links (RS232, RS422, RS485, TTL-level UART), synchronous serial links (I2C, SPI) communications, and Ethernet.

Why You Should Use IO Ninja

Text vs Binary

Some protocols are text-based, and some are binary. Choose the representation that works best in each particular case and switch between the two kinds of data views any time you want.

Clear Timeline

Communications consist of more than just incoming and outgoing data — there are all kinds of other events (connect, disconnect, error, etc.) IO Ninja records everything in a single continuous log sheet to give you a clear timeline of events.

Log Regex Markup

Having too much information before your eyes can be counterproductive. Give yourself some visual aids by marking the log up with colors and packet delimiters — based on regular expression patterns.

Checksum Calculator

Many protocols use checksums to verify the integrity of data. IO Ninja calculates all standard checksums on the fly as you select data in the log, then conveniently displays the results in a table together with local throughputs, time differences, byte offsets, etc.

Multiple Copy Modes

Copy data from the log any way you want — as text, hex, C-array, etc. IO Ninja is smart and can guess what you want from the selection pattern so that a simple Ctrl+C always yields intuitive results.

Terminal Emulator

Sometimes, all you want is the classic terminal rendition of the incoming data. IO Ninja features a fully compatible X-Term terminal view to let you work with remote Linux boxes normally.

Transmission Facilities

IO Ninja features convenient and powerful tools for preparing packets before transmission. There's a plain text editor, a modern hex editor, and a file transmit facility — choose what works best.

Packet Templates

Even with a good hex editor, encoding fields of a binary packet by hand is hard and error-prone. With the Packet Template engine, you describe the packet structure in a C-like language, then conveniently edit your packet in the property grid.

Packet Library

Every time you transmit a packet, it goes to the Packet History pane. Re-transmit any packet with a double click, assign mnemonic names to packets, and build libraries of packets used in your line of work.

Redirect Anything

The Session Linking engine lets you redirect anything to anythingSerialTCP, UDPSSL, SSHWebSocket, etc. Start and configure two sessions, then click Link Sessions, and voila! All the data will be propagated from one session to the other.

Scriptable

Sometimes you need to automate your testing routine. With the Script Pane, you can generate packets programmatically, wait for and react to events, automatically respond to incoming packets, etc.

Extensible Arch

IO Ninja is highly modular, and all the plugins are open-source. See how they are implemented, modify any to your liking, or build something completely new. To make things convenient, do it with the code-assisting IDE that we use ourselves!


Interfaces, Transports, Protocols

Serial

Serial remains one of the most widely used interfaces in IoT and industrial automation. IO Ninja provides you with a rich toolset for debugging serial communications.

Serial Tap
Serial Terminal
Serial Monitor

Ethernet

Hardware and software Ethernet sniffers in IO Ninja shine at the live reconstruction of TCP & UDP data streams. We also provide full interoperability with the industry leader in packet capture — Wireshark.

Ethernet Tap
Ethernet Tap over SSH
Pcap Sniffer

I2C & SPI

Our hardware sniffer for I²C/SPI will give you the most convenient and easy-to-follow data view of I²C and SPI data streams. It works better than logic analyzers when you are interested in high-level data rather than low-level signal details.

I2C/SPI Tap

TCP

TCP is rightfully called the language of the Internet. IO Ninja turns you into a professional linguist in this department.

TCP Terminal
TCP Server Terminal
TCP Flow Monitor

UDP

Not as widespread as TCP, UDP has its undisputed domain of application. With IO Ninja, you have all the necessary tools to troubleshoot connectionless UDP communications.

UDP Terminal
UDP Flow Monitor
UDP Flow Analyzer

SSL

SSL is the transport of the modern Web. IO Ninja gives you powerful terminals to work on both the client and server sides of SSL connections.

SSL Terminal
SSL Server Terminal

SSH

Whenever you talk to a remote Linux box, you need SSH — so, of course, there's a convenient SSH terminal in IO Ninja.

SSH Terminal

WebSocket

WebSockets are widely used in Web applications nowadays. IO Ninja features both client and server-side terminals to help debug your next WebSocket application.

WebSocket Terminal
WebSocket Server Terminal

Pipes

Named and anonymous pipes are important methods of inter-process communications (IPC). IO Ninja provides unique tools for pipe traffic generation and analysis. A must-have for CompuSec researchers!

File Stream Terminal
Named Pipe Server Terminal
Pipe Monitor

USB & HID

We proudly present the low-level USB endpoint terminals and monitors — indispensable tools when developing or analyzing USB devices. There're also specialized tools for HID (Human Interface Devices such as keyboards, mices, joysticks, etc.)

USB Endpoint Terminal
USB Monitor
HID Terminal
HID Monitor

Automation

IO Ninja is the best Modbus analyzer on the market, and we plan to expand the list of supported automation protocols gradually. Our protocol analyzers are implemented as layers so that they can be applied to raw data captured with any plugin.

Modbus Analyzer
DF1 Analyzer

Miscellaneous

IO Ninja is truly versatile, so there's much more than could be fit into the categories above.

J-Link RTT Terminal
Replay Log
TX Modifier