A simple BPFTrace to see TCP SendBytes as a Histogram

A significant difference between BCC and BPF is that BCC is used for complex analysis while BPF programs are mostly one-liners and are ad-hoc based. BPFTrace is an open-source tracer, reference below

https://ebpf.io/ — Excellent introduction to EBPF

https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace — Excellent Resource.

Let me keep this short, we will try to use BPFTrace and capture TCP

we will need

1. Netcat
2. DD for generating a dummy 1GB File
3. bpftrace installed

To understand the efficiency of this, let's attach a Tracepoint, a Kernel Static Probe to capture all of the new processes that get triggered, imagine an equivalent of a TOP utility with means of reacting to the event at run-time if required

https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace/blob/master/docs/reference_guide.md#probes — Lists out type of probes and their utility

We can clearly see we invoked a BPFTrace for tracepoint system calls which takes execve privilege, I executed the ping command and various other commands and you can see that executing an inbound SSH captured invoke of execve-related commands and the system banner.

sudo bpftrace -e 'tracepoint:syscalls:sys_enter_execve { join(args->argv); }'

Attaching 1 probe...

clear
ping 1.1.1.1 -c 1
/usr/bin/clear_console -q
/usr/sbin/sshd -D -o AuthorizedKeysCommand…