drift

Does a device's real network traffic match what it's declared to be allowed to contact? Checked against a real packet capture.

witness checks a website's own traffic against its declared privacy claims, from inside a browser. drift is the same idea pushed past that ceiling: a device on your own network — anything, not just something with a browser in it — checked against a declared allow-list by reading what it actually sent, from a packet capture.

$ drift check http.cap claims.yaml
[XX] 145.254.160.237: 'test workstation' contacted domain(s) outside its declared allow-list: pagead2.googlesyndication.com

0/1 pass, 1 fail

(Real output — see "Tested against real traffic" below for what capture this is and why.)

Read this before anything else: what's actually verified here

The idea this comes from (see the portfolio audit) is a Raspberry Pi acting as a live network tap on a real home network, checking a real smart-home device's real traffic in real time. That deployment is not built or tested here — this session has no access to a Raspberry Pi, a real IoT device, or a real home network to verify any of it against, and building software nobody can verify would be the one thing this whole portfolio has consistently refused to do.

What genuinely is built and tested: the actual analysis core — reading a .pcap/.pcapng file, extracting which domains each device contacted (via DNS queries and HTTP Host: headers), and checking that against a declared allow-list. That core doesn't care whether the capture came from a live Pi tap, a router's own packet-capture feature, or a file someone handed you — a .pcap file is a .pcap file. Wiring this to an actual live tap on real hardware is real, unstarted future work, stated plainly rather than implied by silence.

Scope

Same discipline as witness: this is for checking traffic you captured on a network you own, against claims you declared. It has no notion of any real device manufacturer's actual claims and ships with no data about any real product.

Install

pip install drift-evidence   # the command it installs is `drift`

(drift was already taken on PyPI — same story as most siblings in this portfolio.)

Use

Declare which domains each device (identified by its IP in the capture) is allowed to contact, in claims.yaml:

devices:
  - id: "192.168.1.42"
    name: "smart bulb"
    allowed_domains:
      - vendor.example.com

Then check a real capture against it:

drift check capture.pcap claims.yaml

A device with no entry in claims.yaml reads unverified, never a silent pass — same three-status discipline as every claim-checking tool in this portfolio. --json prints the full report.

How domains are actually extracted

Two signals, both read in the clear regardless of what runs on top of them:

• DNS query names — the device asking "where is X" is visible even when the connection to X itself is fully encrypted. This is the signal that matters for a real modern device, whose actual traffic is mostly HTTPS.
• HTTP Host: headers — cleartext HTTP only, a strictly narrower signal, kept because it names a domain a request actually reached, not just one that was looked up.

What this does NOT do

• Can't read a domain out of an HTTPS/TLS connection. That needs either the TLS ClientHello's SNI field (sent in the clear even over an otherwise-encrypted connection, and not read here) or a decryption key. Real, addable scope — not attempted in this version.
• No live capture of anything. drift reads a .pcap file that already exists; it has no code that touches a network interface. Making one (a Raspberry Pi tap, a router's mirror port, tcpdump itself) is the caller's job.
• Doesn't distinguish which device asked from which device the traffic is actually about beyond source IP. On a network with NAT or DHCP churn, the same IP can mean a different physical device over time — a real limitation of IP-based identification, not solved here.

Privacy

Everything stays on the machine drift runs on. It makes no network calls of its own -- rdpcap reads the .pcap file from disk, and the report goes to stdout or a --json file you name; nothing is uploaded or phoned home anywhere.

The thing to actually be careful of is upstream of drift, not in it: a .pcap captured on a shared network (a router's mirror port, a home Wi-Fi capture) records every device's traffic that happened to be on the wire, not just the one you're checking. extract_domains (in pcap.py) buckets by every source IP it sees, and check_pcap reports on every one of them -- a device with no entry in claims.yaml still comes back unverified, with its full list of observed domains included in the report, exactly the same as a declared device's would be. Point drift at a capture that includes a housemate's phone or a guest's laptop, and their browsing domains end up in your output, not just your smart bulb's.

That's not a bug to fix -- filtering out "devices you didn't mean to capture" isn't something drift can know how to do, since it has no way to tell an incidental bystander's IP from a device you meant to declare later. It's a fact about what a shared-network capture is, and worth knowing before you paste a report somewhere or hand it to someone else: capture only what you mean to, and treat the report as covering everyone who was on the network at the time, not just the device named in your claims file.

Tested against real traffic, not synthetic fixtures

tests/fixtures/http.cap is a real capture downloaded from Wireshark's own official sample-captures page (see tests/fixtures/PROVENANCE.md) — 2004-era traffic of a client requesting a page from www.ethereal.com (Wireshark's former name) whose response pulled in a Google AdSense ad from pagead2.googlesyndication.com. That's a real DNS query and a real HTTP request to an undeclared third party, sitting in a 20-year-old capture nobody built for this purpose — exactly the shape drift exists to catch, found in genuine traffic rather than constructed to prove a point.

Tests

pip install -e .
python tests/test_pcap.py     # domain extraction, against the real fixture above
python tests/test_claims.py   # claims.yaml validation
python tests/test_check.py    # pass/fail/unverified classification
python tests/test_cli.py      # the real CLI entry point, against the real fixture

29 tests.

MIT licensed.