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

Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) syntax


In this section, we'll take a look at the BPF, its syntax, and some of its history.

So, let's talk about BPF's history. Many years ago, every operating system had its own packet filtering API. There are a number of examples, such as Sun, DEC, SGI, and Xerox. They all had their own operating systems, and each operating system had its own API for capturing and filtering packets. So, when you needed to do network analysis, you had to use their specific software, which is built into the operating system, and their specific filtering capabilities within the API that they designed. That made it very difficult because depending on the implementation of your network and what different operating systems were involved, you had to know all these different APIs and all of these different filtering rules in order to get anything done. So, in 1993, Steven McCanne and Van Jacobson released a paper titled The BSD Packet Filter (BPF) and they outlined the rules and the...