Information AboutWireshark |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT WIRESHARK | |
| network analyzers | |
| gtk | |
| open source network management software | |
| unix software | |
In Computing , Wireshark (formerly known as '''Ethereal''') is a Free Software 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. In June 2006 the project was renamed from Ethereal due to trademark issues. http://www.wireshark.org/faq.html#q1.2 The functionality Wireshark provides is very similar to Tcpdump , 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 . Wireshark is released under the GNU General Public License , and it uses the cross-platform GTK+ widget toolkit. It runs on Unix and Unix-like systems, including Linux , Solaris , FreeBSD , NetBSD , OpenBSD and Mac OS X (although GTK+ only works with X11 on Mac OS X, so the user will need to run an X Server such as X11.app ), and on Windows . Wireshark is software that "understands" the structure of different network protocols. Thus it's able to display encapsulation and single fields and interpret their meaning. Wireshark uses Pcap to capture packets, so it can only capture on networks supported by pcap. HISTORY Out of necessity, Gerald Combs (a computer science graduate of the University Of Missouri-Kansas City ) started writing a program called Ethereal so that he could have a tool to capture and analyze packets; he released the first version around 1998. Pretty soon, this GPLed 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 Wireshark's web-site. The name was changed to Wireshark in June, 2006, because creator and lead developer Gerald Combs could not keep using the Ethereal Trademark (which was then owned by his old employer, Network Integration Services ) when he changed jobs. He still held copyright on most of the source code (and the rest was redistributable under the GNU GPL), so he took the Subversion repository for Ethereal and used it as the basis for the Subversion repository of Wireshark. It appears that Ethereal development has ceased, and an Ethereal security advisory recommended switching to Wireshark. eWEEK Labs named Wireshark one of "The Most Important Open-Source Apps of All Time" as of May 2, 2007. http://www.eweek.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=&s=25947&a=206265&po=1,00.asp?p=y FEATURES
SECURITY Capturing raw network traffic from an interface requires special privileges on some platforms. For this reason, Wireshark often runs with Superuser privileges. 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 have allowed remote code execution) and developer's doubts for better future development, OpenBSD removed Ethereal from its ports tree prior to its 3.6 release. One possible alternative is to run Tcpdump , or the dumpcap utility that comes with Wireshark, with superuser privileges to capture packets into a file, and later analyze these packets by running Wireshark with restricted privileges on the packet capture dump file. EXTERNAL LINKS
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