Our paper on libtrace entitled "Libtrace: A Packet Capture and Analysis Library" has been officially published in this month's edition of ACM Computer Communication Review.

It has been a bit of a battle over the years to find a venue that was willing to publish a paper on libtrace, as the direct scientific contribution of libtrace itself is subtle. It was also difficult to articulate exactly how libtrace is so much easier and pleasant to work with compared to other trace analysis libraries. Often the improvements present in libtrace were dismissed out of hand as being nice but not necessary.

For example, capture format agnosticism was dismissed by some reviewers as mostly pointless because they never needed to work with a trace format other than pcap. The performance enhancements were similarly discredited because it was just easier to "buy a faster CPU" or because you could just use a separate zcat process to decompress the trace instead (hence the explicit discussion of the difference between using a separate process + pipe versus the threaded approach employed by libtrace).

As a result, we often had to go back to the drawing board and think more carefully about how to "sell" each of the enhancements in libtrace and clearly explain the reasoning behind each design decision. Eventually we managed to find the right combination of venue and tone that allowed us to finally get a submission accepted.
Hopefully this will lead to more network researchers learning about libtrace and adopting it for use in their own research and analysis tasks.

A copy of the paper can be downloaded from here.

A new version of the BSOD client (2.0.2) was released today. This release fixes the bug where particles would continue traveling past the planes instead of stopping. We've also restored movement through the 3D space using WASD which used to be present in the older clients. Now you can easily zoom in on the interesting endpoints on each plane and click on them easily to identify them!

We've built updated binaries for Mac OS X and Windows too. The Windows binary now comes with a proper installer. Both the Mac and Windows binaries are 32-bit, due to the limitations of some libraries we depend upon, but have been tested successfully on 64-bit machines.

A new version of the server was also recently released that fixes a build error on some systems and fixes a bug where input looping was not working correctly.

The new versions of BSOD server and client can be downloaded from here. Any problems or questions should be addressed to contact [at] wand [dot] net [dot] nz