Internet media is quite popular for the electronic transfer of both business and personal information. But, the same media can be and has been used for the spread of crime and unlawful activities. This demands the need for highly customizable network monitoring tools to capture suspected communications over the network and to analyze them later. However, electronic surveillance itself is against the rights of privacy, free speech and association. PickPacket - a network monitoring tool, that can handle the conflicting issues of network monitoring and privacy through its judicious use. PickPacket has four components - {\em Configuration File Generator} for assisting the users in setting up the filtering parameters, {\em Filter} for capturing the packets in network, {\em Post-Processor} for analysing the output files and {\em Data Viewer} for interactive rendering of the captured sessions.
Earlier version of PickPacket had support for four application protocols - SMTP,HTTP, FTP and Telnet. Chat protocols, by which a group of users form a network to communicate information among themselves, have gained popularity in the last few years. Active use of these protocols on the Internet motivated the need for support of chatting protocols in PickPocket. This thesis discusses extension of PickPacket for two chatting protocols (IRC and Yahoo). Four components of the PickPacket have been upgraded for the support of new protocols. At the end, PickPacket was tested for correctness verification and performance measurement.
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K. Anantha Kiran can be reached at