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Software| Information

  caption Ethereal on Windows XP
  developer Ethereal
  latest Release Version 0990
  latest Release Date April 24 , 2006
  operating System Linux , Solaris , FreeBSD , NetBSD , OpenBSD , Mac OS X and Windows
  genre Network Analyzer
  license GNU General Public License
  website http://wwwetherealcom/


In Computing , Ethereal (''i-'thir-E-&l'') is a protocol analyzer, or " Packet Sniffer " Application , used for Network troubleshooting, analysis, software and Protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features of a protocol analyzer.

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The functionality Ethereal provides is very similar to Tcpdump ''(c.f.)'', but it has a GUI Front-end , and many more information sorting and filtering options. It allows the user to see all traffic being passed over the network (usually an Ethernet network but support is being added for others) by putting the network card into Promiscuous Mode .

Ethereal is released under an Open Source License , and it runs on most Unix and Unix-compatible systems, including Linux , Solaris , FreeBSD , NetBSD , OpenBSD , Mac OS X and Windows , as it uses the cross-platform GTK+ widget toolkit (although GTK+ only works with X11 on Mac OS X, so the user will need to run an X Server such as X11.app ).

Ethereal is software that "understands" the structure of different network protocols. Thus it's able to display encapsulation and single fields and interpret their meaning. Ethereal doesn't have its own code to capture packets. It uses Libpcap/WinPcap for this task, so it can only capture on networks supported by libcap/WinPcap.


FEATURES


  • Data can be captured "from the wire" from a live network connection or read from a capture file.

  • Live data can be read from Ethernet , FDDI , PPP , Token Ring , IEEE 802.11 , Classical IP over ATM , and Loopback interfaces (at least on some platforms; not all of those types are supported on all platforms).

  • Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI , or via the TTY -mode "tethereal" program.

  • Captured files can be programmatically edited or converted via command-line switches to the "editcap" program.

  • Display filters can also be used to selectively highlight and color packet summary information.

  • Data display can be refined using a display filter.

  • Hundreds of Protocol s can be dissected.

  • And more...

  • In the past the Ethereal program could run only if WinPcap was installed on the local machine, now WinPcap is already added to the Ethereal program in a complete package.

  • The terminal ( Command Line ) version of the utility is Tethereal, which can be very handy when working on Unix and Unix-like environments (although it's available on Windows as well)



SECURITY

Capturing raw network traffic from an interface requires special privileges on some platforms. For this reason, Ethereal often runs as root (even on platforms where capturing raw network traffic doesn't require that).

Taking into account the huge number of protocol dissectors, which are called when traffic for their protocol is captured, this can pose a serious security risk given a bug in a dissector. Due to the rather large number of vulnerabilities in the past (of which many even allowed remote code execution) and doubts of developers for better future development, OpenBSD removed Ethereal from its ports tree prior to its 3.6 release.


AUTHOR(S)


Out of necessity, Gerald Combs (a computer science graduate of the University Of Missouri-Kansas City ) started writing the Ethereal code so that he could have a tool to capture and analyze packets; he released the first version around 1998. Pretty soon, this public domain protocol analyzer caught on. As of now there are over 500 contributing authors while Gerald continues to maintain the overall code and issues releases of new versions. The entire list of authors is available from Ethereal's web-site.


EXTERNAL LINKS