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

UDP analysis


We'll take a look at how UDP works, what it is, and what's in the UDP header. The UDP protocol is a connectionless protocol and it's very lightweight—a very small header.

If you'd like to learn more about the UDP protocol, take a look at https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc768.txt:

This is the original specification. It's been updated since August 28, 1980, if you look through all of the RFCs, but the original specification is 768. If you'd like to learn about all the details of UDP, which are relatively short, you can do so through the file shown in the preceding screenshot.

Let's take a look at UDP in Wireshark:

We have a capture of just a few seconds of data and a whole mixture of applications and protocols. What we can do is simply filter based on udp. If you press Enter, now it only shows UDP packets:

And you can see that we have some additional protocols listed, which include applications that use UDP for their transfer, such as SSDP. What we can do in the packet details is take a...