TCP Terminal

Connect, Send and Analyze TCP Packets

The TCP Connection plugin turns IO Ninja into a raw TCP terminal, allowing you to connect to network nodes, send custom packets, and analyze responses. It lets you prepare packets in binary mode with a hex editor and provides detailed logging and transmission capabilities. You can also configure aspects of the TCP socket, such as the local interface, port, Nagle’s algorithm, and how connections are closed. This makes it a practical tool for exploring network behavior and testing TCP communication.

Why TCP Connection?

Experiment with Web Server Responses

Curious about how a Web server reacts to malformed packets? The plugin allows you to test this directly, empowering you to observe real-time behavior without relying on guesswork.

Comprehensive TCP Socket Control

Gain complete control over the TCP socket, including:

Choosing the local interface and port.
Configuring the use of Nagle's algorithm for optimized packet delivery.
Deciding how to terminate the connection, either gracefully or by sending a TCP RST.

This level of customization ensures a tailored approach to handling TCP communications, making it an indispensable tool for network professionals and enthusiasts alike.

Powerful & Beautiful Logging Engine

The Ninja Scroll logging engine is the heart of IO Ninja! It offers many unique and useful features you won't find in other TCP terminals, such as interleaving binary data with informational messages for a clear timeline of events, switching between hex-view and plain-text view of binary data, a regex markup engine for highlighting data based on regular expressions, and many others!

Versatile Transmission Facilities

IO Ninja features convenient and powerful tools for preparing TCP packets before transmission. We offer a plain text editor with support for C ESC-sequences to encode special characters, a modern Unicode-enabled hex editor, and a file transmit feature.

A history of recently transmitted TCP packets is maintained, and you can also build your own libraries of commonly used packets — then send those packets with a mouse click!

Scriptability

With the Script Pane, you can generate TCP packets programmatically, wait for and react to TCP events, and automatically reply to incoming data, etc.

For more complex binary packets, you can describe the structure and methods for updating checksums or other auto-calculated fields as a Packet Template, then conveniently fill in the fields in a property grid.

Getting Started

Step 1. Start a Session

Begin by launching a TCP Connection session.

Step 2. Begin Connection

Type your target address/port and click "Connect".

Step 3. Craft and Send Custom Packets

Use the "Transmit" pane to craft a custom packet, and then press send.

Documentation

Resource
TCP Connection Documentation in the IO Ninja User Manual

Plugin	Relevance
TCP Proxy	An essential tool for inspecting data exchanged between two TCP nodes.
TCP Server Terminal	Server-side counterpart of TCP Connection. Used to accept incoming connections.
TCP Flow Monitor	Reconstruct TCP streams from packets captured via Pcap.