Install yaf with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• airdaemon
• filedaemon
• getFlowKeyHash
• yaf
• yafMeta2Pcap
• yafcollect
• yafscii

Project history

The NetSA documentation describes YAF as the data collection component of the CERT NetSA Security Suite. Its original purpose was experimental: tracking work in the IETF IPFIX working group, especially bidirectional flow representation, archival storage formats, structured export, and deep packet inspection fields.

A 2010 USENIX LISA paper by Christopher M. Inacio and Brian Trammell presented YAF as a reference implementation of an IPFIX metering and exporting process and as a platform for rapid deployment of new flow-meter capabilities. The modern NetSA site keeps both a stable 2.x documentation set and a 3.x pre-release line, showing that the tool remained maintained long after its research-prototype origins.

Adoption history

YAF adoption is tied to operational network monitoring, especially environments that already use SiLK, super_mediator, Analysis Pipeline, Mothra, or other IPFIX-compatible collectors. Its niche is converting high-volume packet observation into compact flow records that analysts can store, query, and correlate without preserving every packet payload.

How it is used

Common usage is to run `yaf` against a live interface, a pcap file, or a list of captures, export IPFIX to a collector, or write an IPFIX-based file for later processing. The documentation emphasizes flow building, DPI fields for protocols such as DNS, SSL, HTTP, and SMTP, and PCAP indexing workflows for retrospective analysis.

For package users, the important distinction is that YAF is not a packet-display tool like tcpdump or Wireshark. It is a sensor component that summarizes packet streams into flow data for downstream security analytics.

Why package nerds care

YAF is interesting to package nerds because it packages a research-grade IPFIX metering implementation as a Unix sensor daemon and CLI suite. It also sits at the boundary between standards work, security operations, and package-manager distribution: libpcap in, IPFIX and SiLK-style workflows out.

Timeline

• 2006: The public YAF release history begins with the 0.1.0 series.
• 2010: YAF was presented at USENIX LISA as Yet Another Flowmeter, a reference IPFIX metering and exporting implementation.
• 2011: The release history records the YAF 2.0.0 line.
• 2020s: The NetSA site documents YAF 2.x as stable and YAF 3.x as a pre-release line.

Related projects

• SiLK, super_mediator, Analysis Pipeline, and Mothra are the NetSA tools most directly connected to YAF output.
• libpcap and tcpdump are adjacent capture-layer tools, while IPFIX collectors are the protocol-level peers that consume YAF export streams.

Sources

• https://tools.netsa.cert.org/yaf/
• https://tools.netsa.cert.org/yaf2/
• https://tools.netsa.cert.org/yaf2/release-history.html
• https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa10/yaf-yet-another-flowmeter