Portsniff

This Rust CLI Port Scanner is a lightweight, efficient tool designed to scan open ports on a given IP address. Developed as a small personal project to learn Rust and explore its features, this scanner utilizes Rust's concurrency model to handle TCP connections in parallel.

Rust, Cargo

To install the Rust CLI Port Scanner, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/amitrahman1026/portsniff.git
cd portsniff

2. Build the project using Cargo:

cargo build --release

This generates a binary in target/release/.

To use the port scanner, run the binary with the desired IP address and the number of threads.

cargo run -- -t <threads> <IP address>

• : The number of threads to use for the scan. More threads can speed up the scan but might increase the load on your network.
• : The target IP address to scan.

Scan an IP address with the default number of threads (4):

cargo run -- 127.0.0.1

Scan an IP address using 10 threads:

cargo run -- -t 1000 127.0.0.1

Previously, this project utilized OS threads for concurrency. However, as the need arose to spawn a large number of threads for efficient port scanning, switching to Tokio runtime became a more suitable choice. Tokio provides an asynchronous runtime and futures-based concurrency model, which enables efficient handling of thousands of concurrent tasks without the overhead of managing OS threads manually.

As a learning project, contributions, suggestions, and feedback are welcome especially for more idiomatic syntax.