in its current formour sniffer receives all of the ip headers along with any higher protocols such as tcpudpor icmp the information is packed into binary formand as shown aboveis quite difficult to understand we are now going to work on decoding the ip portion of packet so that we can pull useful information out such as the protocol type (tcpudpicmp)and the source and destination ip addresses this will be the foundation for you to start creating further protocol parsing later on if we examine what an actual packet looks like on the networkyou will have an understanding of how we need to decode the incoming packets refer to figure - for the makeup of an ip header figure - typical ipv header structure we will decode the entire ip header (except the options fieldand extract the protocol typesourceand destination ip address using the python ctypes module to create -like structure will allow us to have friendly format for handling the ip header and its member fields firstlet' take look at the definition of what an ip header looks like struct ip u_char ip_hl: u_char ip_v: u_char ip_tosu_short ip_lenu_short ip_idu_short ip_offu_char ip_ttlu_char ip_pu_short ip_sumu_long ip_srcu_long ip_dstyou now have an idea of how to map the data types to the ip header values using code as reference when translating to python objects can be useful because it makes it seamless to convert them to pure python of notethe ip_hl and ip_v fields have bit notation added to them (the : partthis indicates that these are bit fieldsand they are bits wide we will use pure python solution to make sure these fields map correctly so we can avoid having to do any bit manipulation let' implement our ip decoding routine into sniffer_ip_header_decode py as shown below import socket