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

HTTP analysis I


In this section, we'll take a look at how HTTP works (what are some of the codes within HTTP and what's inside a packet), source and destination information and some of the options there, and how servers and clients interact and show a connection between a server and a client.

What we'll do is start another packet capture and open up a website. In this example, I opened up a web page to https://www.npr.org/, which happens to be an unencrypted website. It uses plain HTTP by default so, that way, the communication is not hidden behind TLS encryption. This way, we can take a look at what actually happens within the HTTP headers.

If we scroll down, we can see we have the www.npr.org DNS resolution, our answer, and the beginning of the SYN, ACK three-way handshake for the TCP connection:

Note

We will also see some akamai DNS resolutions, as well, and that's because if we take a look at www.npr.org it is actually hosted off of some akamai servers, which is a content distribution network...