CoralReef Software Suite

CoralReef is a comprehensive software suite developed by CAIDA to collect and analyze data from passive Internet traffic monitors, in real time or from trace files. The package includes support for standard network interfaces and specialized high performance monitoring devices, programming APIs for C and perl, and applications for capture, analysis, and web report generation. The CoralReef package is developed and maintained by CAIDA developers with the support and collaboration of the Internet measurement community.

| Home Software Components Applications Hardware Online Documentation More Information Download Current Release |

Example graph produced using CoralReef's crl_flow and HTML Report Generator applications, showing packet traffic seen by CAIDA's SDNAP monitor categorized by source Autonomous System (AS)

Goals and Development Philosophy

CoralReef is a project of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). It evolved from the Coral project developed at SDSC by NLANR MOAT to monitor OC3 and OC12 flows at MCI.

Released in March 1999, CoralReef 3.0 marked a significant breakthrough in the evolution of the CoralReef suite. With this release, the libcoral library, the foundation upon which the entire CoralReef suite rests, was made available to developers. The libcoral library and its associated C and Perl APIs make it easier for anyone to develop traffic analysis software. It is hoped that the release of the libcoral library will encourage the research and professional community to use CoralReef to develop their own Internet traffic analysis tools.

The current version of CoralReef supports monitoring of any standard network interface (via libpcap) on unix-like systems, as well as specialized high performance ATM, POS, and Ethernet devices at up to OC192 and 10 GigE bandwidths on Intel-based workstations running FreeBSD or Linux. See the Hardware page for more information.

CoralReef also includes a suite of ready-made software solutions for monitoring and analysis of live traffic and recorded traffic traces. The package is continually evolving to support CAIDA's passive traffic analysis work as well as that of the research community. Feedback, requests and improvements are appreciated and can be sent to coral-info@caida.org.

Gallery

Realtime reports of several live network links by the CoralReef HTML Report Generator.
Several Passive Monitoring Animations describe the workings and usage of parts of CoralReef.
Several Security Animations show the results of CoralReef analysis of the Witty worm, Sapphire worm, and Code Red worm.