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

802.11 analysis


In this section, we'll take a look at wireless connection issues and how they look in Wireshark.

The 802.11 standard has been around for quite some time. You can find more info at http://ieee802.org/11/Reports/802.11_Timelines.htm:

It originally started in 1997. You can see in the preceding screenshot that this was the year it was ratified. It actually began in 1991. Since then it has had many changes to it, including 802.11a, which some people may remember. We have 802.11b, 802.11g, and so on. As we go up in time, you can see how many different flavors of 802.11 there are out there. Now, not all of them have been used for normal home networks or office networks; some of these are specialty versions for long distance or low power such as WiMAX. You can see that all the ones that I've been going through have been superseded by a newer version, and these newer versions are at the top:

These are the ratified standards. You can see that even though 802.11a and b and g and n are...