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

Wireshark plugins


In this section, we'll take a look at Wireshark plugins that are available and see how to develop them.

Now, plugins in Wireshark are dissectors, and dissectors are different ways for Wireshark to analyze and take apart different protocols. If, for some reason, Wireshark is unable to interpret the data you are capturing, you can look for additional dissectors that are out there, or write your own, in order to accomplish what you wish to accomplish.

The Wireshark wiki has a page here on dissectors (https://wiki.wireshark.org/Lua/Dissectors):

It explains how, from a programmatic standpoint, you would handle designing and creating a dissector. You can see on the page that it goes through many of the details in order to do so. It has some great information on how you would handle a dissector, and what it would do and how you'd go about creating it, but it doesn't actually tell you the individual API data. You can go to the Wireshark developer's guide in order to do so (https:...