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

Decrypting wireless network traffic


Wireshark also facilitates decryption of wireless traffic through embedding a pre-shared key under the 802.11 protocol section. The following screenshot depicts normal wireless traffic being sniffed from a nearby access point:

WLAN traffic before decryption

In order to decrypt the preceding listed packets, we need to configure the IEEE 802.11 section as follows:

  1. Go to Edit | Preferences, expand the Protocol section, select IEEE 802.11 and configure it as follows:

  1. Click on the Edit button next to Decryption Keys.
  2. Click on New and add the WEP/WPA key to enable decryption. After all the changes have been made, click on OK:

Now you will be shown the decrypted traffic as follows:

WLAN traffic after decryption