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Packet Analysis with Wireshark
Packet Analysis with Wireshark

Packet Analysis with Wireshark: Leverage the power of Wireshark to troubleshoot your networking issues by using effective packet analysis techniques and performing improved protocol analysis

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Packet Analysis with Wireshark

Chapter 1. Packet Analyzers

A packet analyzer is also known as a packet sniffer or a network protocol analyzer. Packet analyzer has the ability to grab the raw packet from the wire, wireless, Bluetooth, VLAN, PPP, and other network types, without getting processed by the application. By doing so it brings the whole science and innovation to this field. In this chapter we will see a few use cases of the packet analyzer by covering the following topics:

  • Uses for packet analyzers
  • Introducing Wireshark
  • Other packet analyzer tools
  • Mobile packet capturing

Uses for packet analyzers

More practically, packet analyzers are employed in network security and to analyze raw traffic so as to detect scans and attacks, and for sniffing, network troubleshooting, and many more uses, as shown in the following image:

Uses for packet analyzers

Packet analyzers can be used as follows:

  • Network administrators can diagnose problems on a network
  • Security architects can perform a security audit on a packet
  • Protocol developers can diagnose/learn protocol-related issues
  • White-hat hackers can find vulnerabilities in the application and fix them before black-hat hacker find them

The use is not limited to these bullet point, there are lots of new tools and innovations happening in this area. Find a use case and build your own packet analyzer; the best example is Wireshark.

Introducing Wireshark

Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today. Wireshark is a powerful packet analyzer tool, with an easy-to-use, rich GUI and a command-line utility with very active community support: http://ask.wireshark.org.

Wireshark uses pcap (libpcap) to capture packets, which means it can capture packets in offline mode—to view the captured packets—and online mode (live traffic) to capture and display the traffic in the Wireshark GUI. Once open, the Wireshark GUI looks like this:

Introducing Wireshark

Wireshark features

We will see some of the important features that are available in Wireshark in the following figure:

Wireshark features

Wireshark has the following cool built-in features, few of them are listed as follows:

  • Available in both UNIX and Windows
  • Ability to capture live packets from various types of interface
  • Filters packets with many criteria
  • Ability to decode larger sets of protocols
  • Can save and merge captured packets
  • Can create various statistics
  • User-friendly GUI and command-line interface
  • Active community support (http://ask.wireshark.org)

Wireshark's dumpcap and tshark

The Wireshark installation provides some command-line tools such as dumpcap and tshark. Wireshark and tshark rely on dumpcap to capture traffic; more advanced functionality is performed by tshark. Also note that dumpcap can be run as its own standalone utility. tshark is a command-line version of Wireshark and can be used in the remote terminal.

The Wireshark packet capture process

The user must be aware of where Wireshark is installed and it should be obliged with your organization policy before start capturing on the TAP (Test Access Point) or Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) port.

Usually developers install Wireshark on their personal laptop/desktop and capture packets, which goes in-out from the box.

Certain guidelines should be followed to perform this:

  1. Make sure you're allowed to do what you're going to do; check your corporate policies before capturing a packet.
  2. The operating system must support packet capturing:
    • Linux packet socket support is enabled in the kernel by default
    • Windows requires WinPCap to be installed
  3. Choose the interface and enable the promiscuous mode on it. Promiscuous mode accepts all packets whether they are addressed to the interface or not.
  4. If using a Wi-Fi interface, enable the monitor mode for WLAN capturing.
  5. Start capturing and use Wireshark's different features like (filters/statistics/IO/save) for further analysis
    The Wireshark packet capture process

Other packet analyzer tools

Wireshark is a packet analysis tool to use features such as packet editing/replaying, performing MITM, ARPspoof, IDS, and HTTP proxy, and there are other packet analyzer tools available and can be used as well.

The following is a list (not limited) of notable packet analyzer tools on the market; many others are commercially available. The table lists tools and their features:

Tools

Packet editing

Packet replay

ARPspoof/MITM

Password sniffing

Intrusion detection

HTTP debugger

WireEdit (https://wireedit.com/)

Y

N

N

N

N

N

Scapy (http://www.secdev.org/)

Y

Y

Y

Y

N

Y

Ettercap (https://ettercap.github.io/ettercap/)

Y

N

Y

Y

N

N

Tcpreplay (http://tcpreplay.synfin.net/)

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Bit-Twist (http://bittwist.sourceforge.net/)

Y

N

N

N

N

N

Cain (http://www.oxid.it/cain.html)

N

N

Y

Y

N

N

Snort (https://www.snort.org/)

N

N

N

N

Y

N

Mobile packet capture

Wireshark is not available on mobile platforms such as Android, iOS, or Windows. In order to capture mobile traffic the following tools are suggested based on the platform:

Platform

Packet capture tool used

URL

Windows

Microsoft Network Analyzers

http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=19484

iOS

Paros

http://sourceforge.net/projects/paros/

Android

Shark for Root

http://www.appbrain.com/app/shark-for-root/lv.n3o.shark

Kismet Android PCAP

http://www.kismetwireless.net/android-pcap/

Various other techniques are used to capture mobile traffic using Wireshark. One such technique is creating a Wi-Fi hotspot on the laptop, allowing the mobile phone to use this Wi-Fi, and sniffing traffic on your Wi-Fi interface using Wireshark.

Summary

In this chapter we learned what packet analyzers are and what their use cases are. After a quick introduction to Wireshark, we covered what goes on behind-the-scenes when Wireshark captures packets; Wireshark benefits and important features; the necessary prerequisites before capturing packets; and other packet analyzer tools for packet editing/sniffing/replaying and so on. We also provided a brief overview of mobile packet capturing.

The next chapter will be more specific to Wireshark and its tips and tricks. After that we will explore TCP troubleshooting, then plunge into SSL, and other application protocols such as DHCPv6, DHCP, DNS, and HTTP. We will also analyze Wi-Fi capturing and carry out some security analyses with the help of Wireshark and tcpdump.

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Description

Wireshark provides a very useful way to decode an RFC and examine it. The packet captures displayed in Wireshark give you an insight into the security and flaws of different protocols, which will help you perform the security research and protocol debugging. The book starts by introducing you to various packet analyzers and helping you find out which one best suits your needs. You will learn how to use the command line and the Wireshark GUI to capture packets by employing filters. Moving on, you will acquire knowledge about TCP/IP communication and its use cases. You will then get an understanding of the SSL/TLS flow with Wireshark and tackle the associated problems with it. Next, you will perform analysis on application-related protocols. We follow this with some best practices to analyze wireless traffic. By the end of the book, you will have developed the skills needed for you to identify packets for malicious attacks, intrusions, and other malware attacks.

Who is this book for?

If you are a network or system administrator who wants to effectively capture packets, a security consultant who wants to audit packet flows, or a white hat hacker who wants to view sensitive information and remediate it, this book is for you. This book requires decoding skills and a basic understanding of networking.

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Dec 04, 2015
Length: 172 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785887819
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Length: 172 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785887819
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Tools :

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
1. Packet Analyzers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Capturing Packets Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Analyzing the TCP Network Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Analyzing SSL/TLS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Analyzing Application Layer Protocols Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. WLAN Capturing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Security Analysis Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.3
(4 Ratings)
5 star 0%
4 star 75%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 25%
Sussane Miller Mar 31, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I've gone through the e-book. It was easy to understand. And it carried lot of information which will be useful to troubleshoot the networking issues by using effective packet analysis. I recommend this book for others to go through!I've read a number of Wireshark books and I think this book has done one of the better jobs of describing a solid methodology.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer Mar 31, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
The book Really leverages the power of Wireshark to troubleshoot your networking issues. I like the fact of effective packet analysis techniques and performing improved protocol analysis in the book. I think Ashish Nath has done a great job considering his amount of experience. Interesting read .
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Quardy Jan 16, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Packet Analysis with Wireshark is an excellent resource for troubleshooting network errors and identifying network vulnerabilities. There are a lot of various samples in the book including decrypting SSL/TLS, DCHPv6, WLANs, and numerous security analyses amongst other topics however they don’t really get into too much depth. It’s very easy to read and very fast paced - no fluff straight to the point type book so it makes an excellent Wireshark reference guide.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer Dec 09, 2016
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Not upto mark and it is assumed that this book is written without any review, skip practicals and donot describe many of topics...
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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