Hints for Ettercap on MacOS

Introduction

Due to the BSD origins of Mac OS X, most Linux based programs and libraries can be ported to Mac OS X. Basically the challenge is the distribution of pre-compiled software packages to ease the pain of manually resolving dependencies and manual compilation of the same. I recommend using Homebrew for doing this job.

Installing Homebrew

Homebrew can be easily installed by running the installation command on the official Homebrew website.

Installing pre-compiled ettercap package

To just install ettercap just type:

brew install ettercap

Ettercap is provided w/o GTK support and w/o any debug symbols.

Building ettercap from GitHub source

To be able to customize ettercap you need to fetch the sources from GitHub and compile on Mac OS X. Typical use cases are to enable the GTK interface, test the latest code base or reproduce issues in debug mode. Building ettercap from source requires some dependencies to be met before being able to compile.

The following example shows how to compile ettercap in Debug mode with IPv6 support enabled.

brew update
brew install check curl cmake ghostscript gtk+ gtk+3 libidn libnet luajit rtmpdump geoip
git clone https://github.com/Ettercap/ettercap
cd ettercap
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -ENABLE_IPV6=On -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=`brew --prefix openssl` ..
make
sudo make install

The definition of OpenSSL root directory is necessary since Homebrew doesn't install OpenSSL at a expected location for CMake.

The whole procedure has been demonstrated in this video on YouTube.