Introducing the IEEE-Registry crate

I’m doing some quick work on the arp-scan-rs crate, to convert it from a cli app to cli + library so that its scans can be performed programatically. It basically uses arp to find and identify devices on your local network.

I noticed that its database of vendors used a very limited version of the IEEE oui database. That got me to thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to easily get a copy of the latest database?

So I sketched out what that might look like. Basically, request the path to the locally cached database. If the file doesn’t exist, download it in situ. I spent a couple nights putting together IEEE-Registry, which should work as advertised.

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# Perform a scan on the default network interface
$ arp-scan

Selected interface wlp1s0 with IP 192.168.1.21/24
Estimated scan time 2068ms (10752 bytes, 14000 bytes/s)
Sending 256 ARP requests (waiting at least 800ms, 0ms request interval)

| IPv4            | MAC               | Hostname     | Vendor       |
|-----------------|-------------------|--------------|--------------|
| 192.168.1.1     | 91:10:fb:30:06:04 | router.home  | Vendor, Inc. |
| 192.168.1.11    | 45:2e:99:bc:22:b6 | host-a.home  |              |
| 192.168.1.15    | bc:03:c2:92:47:df | host-b.home  | Vendor, Inc. |
| 192.168.1.18    | 8d:eb:56:17:b8:e1 | host-c.home  | Vendor, Inc. |
| 192.168.1.34    | 35:e0:6c:1e:e3:fe |              | Vendor, Inc. |

ARP scan finished, 5 hosts found in 1.623 seconds
7 packets received, 5 ARP packets filtered

To get a copy of the database programatically, it’s as simple as:

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use ieee_registry::*;

// Get the path to oui.csv, downloading it if necessary.
let oui_path = get_oui_path();

or run the included binary:

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$ ieee-registry
Caching IEEE registry file(s)...
✔ /home/user/.local/share/ieee/cid.csv
✔ /home/user/.local/share/ieee/eth.csv
✔ /home/user/.local/share/ieee/iab.csv
✔ /home/user/.local/share/ieee/mam.csv
✔ /home/user/.local/share/ieee/man.csv
✔ /home/user/.local/share/ieee/opid.csv
✔ /home/user/.local/share/ieee/oui.csv
✔ /home/user/.local/share/ieee/oui36.csv

oui_path now points to ~/.local/share/ieee/oui.csv, which can then be parsed and used to lookup the vendor of found ethernet devices. My arp-scan went from no vendors detected to almost 90% found.