Book Image

Mastering Wireshark 2

By : Andrew Crouthamel
Book Image

Mastering Wireshark 2

By: Andrew Crouthamel

Overview of this book

Wireshark, a combination of a Linux distro (Kali) and an open source security framework (Metasploit), is a popular and powerful tool. Wireshark is mainly used to analyze the bits and bytes that flow through a network. It efficiently deals with the second to the seventh layer of network protocols, and the analysis made is presented in a form that can be easily read by people. Mastering Wireshark 2 helps you gain expertise in securing your network. We start with installing and setting up Wireshark2.0, and then explore its interface in order to understand all of its functionalities. As you progress through the chapters, you will discover different ways to create, use, capture, and display filters. By halfway through the book, you will have mastered Wireshark features, analyzed different layers of the network protocol, and searched for anomalies. You’ll learn about plugins and APIs in depth. Finally, the book focuses on pocket analysis for security tasks, command-line utilities, and tools that manage trace files. By the end of the book, you'll have learned how to use Wireshark for network security analysis and configured it for troubleshooting purposes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributor
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Installing Wireshark 2
Index

IPv4 and IPv6 analysis


We'll now take a look at the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 and learn about issues and features such as the fragmentation of these packets, broadcast storms, and flags within the IPv4 and the IPv6 header.

What we have is some data from a packet capture going to a website which was encrypted, so that's why we see a lot of TLS in the protocol information:

And we see that we have Application Data in the Info column, which is all of the encrypted data transmitting back and forth to the web server. Go to IPv4 in the packet details, expand that, and we can take a look at the information in the IPv4 header:

We can see that, right after Internet Protocol Version 4, it's saying that it's Version: 4; otherwise, it will show Version 6. It also has the Header Length, which is the number of bytes in the header. Sometimes, the Header Length can fluctuate, so it defines how big that header is so that the application knows where the differentiating point is between the header and...