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

Chapter 13: Diving into DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) converts a human-readable hostname into an Internet Protocol (IP) address. It is one of the most common application layer protocols in use today and is essential to any network. In this chapter, we'll review the purpose of DNS along with a brief history so that you can better understand how it all began. We'll then cover the different types of servers, such as root, authoritative, and recursive. Additionally, we'll compare how DNS records are transported when resolving an IP address versus updating the zone file.

To get a better understanding of this protocol, we'll review some of the common types and classes of Resource Records (RRs). We'll also examine the DNS packet structure by drilling down into the header and query sections using Wireshark. You'll be able to recognize key field values such as the transaction Identification (ID) and header flags. In addition, you'll be able to break...