A thought occurred whilst using the "decode as" option under Ethereal 0.8.16
(which is dead handy - especially for RTSP!). I clicked on the wrong decode
by mistake and Ethereal blew up (under Win32).
OK, so I made a mistake. But then I thought - hey, shouldn't the decode just
put junk in its fields, or say the packet was corrupted? Otherwise, what
happens when a slightly malformed packet turns up that is actually destined
for the decoder, won't it crash again?
Perhaps we have here a new method of testing decoders - using a large packet
(e.g. and FTP transfer) and using the decode-as option to decode it as RTSP,
NBSS etc. etc.. Any decoder that causes Ethereal to bounce needs to
therefore have its bounds-checking strengthened.
Perhaps we can take this further. By creating a set of different (non-valid
in any decode) test packets, we could automatically get each release of
Ethereal to speed through using each decode in turn to test for stability.
Is this a daft idea?
Andy Leigh
Senior Planning Engineer, Strategic Network Development
T: +44 (0)20 7765 0575
M: +44 (0)7802 456097
E: andy.leigh@xxxxxxxxx
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