Are there any traceroute programs that do not rely on ICMP echo requests?

Question

Are there any traceroute programs that do not rely on ICMP echo requests?

Please list any programs if you know of them, or ways to achieve a traceroute without ICMP echo requests.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use traceroute itself.

By default most UNIX traceroute implementations (e.g. Linux, OSX) will not use ICMP echo requests. They use UDP packets to an unlikely port.

(However, Windows tracert will use ICMP echo requests and as far as I know there is no option to change that.)

UNIX based traceroute usually allows the user to select alternative methods including ICMP echo requests, TCP and more. The options to select these depend on your traceroute implementation. For example on Linux you would do

traceroute -T

to do a TCP based traceroute, while on OSX it would be

traceroute -P TCP

However, all traceroute implementations rely on the reception of ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED messages.