Book Image

Wireshark 2 Quick Start Guide

By : Charit Mishra
Book Image

Wireshark 2 Quick Start Guide

By: Charit Mishra

Overview of this book

<p>Wireshark is an open source protocol analyser, commonly used among the network and security professionals. Currently being developed and maintained by volunteer contributions of networking experts from all over the globe. Wireshark is mainly used to analyze network traffic, analyse network issues, analyse protocol behaviour, etc. - it lets you see what's going on in your network at a granular level. This book takes you from the basics of the Wireshark environment to detecting and resolving network anomalies.</p> <p>This book will start from the basics of setting up your Wireshark environment and will walk you through the fundamentals of networking and packet analysis. As you make your way through the chapters, you will discover different ways to analyse network traffic through creation and usage of filters and statistical features. You will look at network security packet analysis, command-line utilities, and other advanced tools that will come in handy when working with day-to-day network operations.</p> <p>By the end of this book, you have enough skill with Wireshark 2 to overcome real-world network challenges.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
8
Mastering the Advanced Features of Wireshark
Index

Usual and unusual wireless traffic


In 2003, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) was launched by Wi-Fi Alliance as a measure to make WLAN communication stronger than the previous protocol, WEP. The key size used by WEP is 40/104 bits, whereas WPA uses a key size of 256 bits and also facilitates integrity checks. In WEP, the traditional CRC was implemented, but WPA introduced, the popular Michael 64-bit Message integrity check (MIC).

WPA uses the RC4 algorithm to build a session based on dynamic encryption keys (you would never end up using the same key pair between two hosts). Refer to the following illustration of how the cipher text is formed that is transmitted over the medium:

The process starts by appending the IV and the dynamically generated 256-bit key. Followed by encryption using RC4 algorithm, the resulting encrypted key stream is then appended with the data and voila! We have the final cipher text.

Refer to the following diagram depicting the authentication process in WPA:

The following...