Install masscan with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• masscan

Project history

The public GitHub repository was created in July 2013, and early releases appeared in September and October 2013. The README describes the tool as able to scan the entire Internet in under five minutes from a single machine at up to 10 million packets per second, using its own TCP/IP stack and asynchronous transmit and receive threads.

MASSCAN's 1.0 release arrived in October 2013, and a Kali-tagged prerelease was already published in September 2013. Later releases added practical improvements such as dynamic libpcap loading, memcached support, and IPv6 support in the 1.3.0 line, followed by fixes for the IPv6 transition.

The design section of the README explicitly positions MASSCAN relative to earlier high-speed scanners such as scanrand, unicornscan, and ZMap, while making the command-line and output style familiar to `nmap` users.

Adoption history

MASSCAN is widely adopted for a command-line security tool: the repository has tens of thousands of GitHub stars and thousands of forks, and the supplied package metadata lists packages across Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, MacPorts, and Nix.

Its package-manager footprint reflects its role in security labs, reconnaissance workflows, and network inventory jobs where users want a readily installable binary rather than building research code by hand.

How it is used

Users provide ports and target ranges, for example `masscan -p80,8000-8100 10.0.0.0/8`, and can emit or reuse configuration with `--echo` and `-c`. The README documents XML, binary, grepable, JSON, and list output formats.

MASSCAN is tuned for breadth. The README contrasts it with `nmap`: it uses randomized host order, raw packet sending, no default ports, no DNS resolution, and an asynchronous model suited to large address ranges. It also warns that banner grabbing and other TCP interactions can conflict with the host network stack unless source IPs, source ports, and firewall rules are configured carefully.

The default configuration file is `/etc/masscan/masscan.conf`, and command-line settings override that default. The README recommends using exclude files for Internet-scale scans and includes prominent cautions about scanning responsibly.

Why package nerds care

MASSCAN is package-nerd significant because it is one of the canonical examples of a single-purpose C security tool that package managers make safe to acquire, update, and remove across many Unix-like systems.

It also shows why packaging security tools matters: users get reproducible builds and OS integration for software that otherwise encourages copying binaries or building from source before running high-impact network scans.

Timeline

• 2013: GitHub repository created.
• 2013: Early v1 and Kali prereleases published.
• 2013: 1.0 release published.
• 2020: 1.3.0 release adds IPv6 support.
• 2026: Repository remains active with recent commits.

Related projects

• MASSCAN is related to `nmap`, but optimized for broad asynchronous scanning rather than detailed host inspection.
• The README also compares its asynchronous approach with scanrand, unicornscan, and ZMap.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/robertdavidgraham/masscan
• https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan
• https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan/releases
• source_facts.package-manager-url