Book Image

Learn Wireshark, - Second Edition

By : Lisa Bock
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Wireshark, - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Lisa Bock

Overview of this book

Wireshark is a popular and powerful packet analysis tool that helps network administrators investigate latency issues and potential attacks. Over the years, there have been many enhancements to Wireshark’s functionality. This book will guide you through essential features so you can capture, display, and filter data with ease. In addition to this, you’ll gain valuable tips on lesser-known configuration options, which will allow you to complete your analysis in an environment customized to suit your needs. This updated second edition of Learn Wireshark starts by outlining the benefits of traffic analysis. You’ll discover the process of installing Wireshark and become more familiar with the interface. Next, you’ll focus on the Internet Suite and then explore deep packet analysis of common protocols such as DNS, DHCP, HTTP, and ARP. The book also guides you through working with the expert system to detect network latency issues, create I/O and stream graphs, subset traffic, and save and export captures. Finally, you’ll understand how to share captures using CloudShark, a browser-based solution for analyzing packet captures. By the end of this Wireshark book, you’ll have the skills and hands-on experience you need to conduct deep packet analysis of common protocols and network troubleshooting as well as identify security issues.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1 Traffic Capture Overview
6
Part 2 Getting Started with Wireshark
11
Part 3 The Internet Suite TCP/IP
16
Part 4 Deep Packet Analysis of Common Protocols
21
Part 5 Working with Packet Captures

Comparing different capture engines

To effectively capture and analyze traffic, there must be a way to gather the raw traffic from the network before being processed by the OS. A Packet Capture (PCAP) engine provides an API to capture traffic. Wireshark uses one of several capture engines, such as libpcap, WinPCap, and Npcap. Let's begin with outlining libpcap.

Understanding libpcap

Libpcap is a capture engine that was originally developed for a Unix-like OS. Libpcap is incorporated into tcpdump, Snort, and other packet analyzers to grab packets as they come off the network interface.

Wireshark and tshark work with libpcap and generate pcapng files by default. Libpcap and tcpdump are developed and maintained at http://www.tcpdump.org/. In the late 1990s, a version of libpcap was adapted for Windows called WinPcap, as we'll discuss next.

Examining WinPcap

WinPcap is a capture engine that uses drivers...