Ethereal-users: [Ethereal-users] Using ethereal for protocol analysis and voilation detection

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: "Ankur Aggarwal" <ankur@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 14:42:34 +0530

Hi

 

I was trying to develop ethereal for wireless lan and TCP protocol and session analysis and find out if the machine communications are violating the protocol IEEE specifications and find if the developers/ administrator or the card is violating the IEEE standards without manually going through all the packets captured in the overnight run.

As a starter I would like to implement:

1)       See if the packet responses at each protocol layer was correct and before the time out ( eg. Data-Ack, RTS-CTS, AssocReq-AssocRsp etc.)

2)       There were a sequence number duplication, jump.

3)       Few rarely occurring but very important cases:

a.       A packet was correctly captured, yet retried.

b.       A packet not being acked, but also not retried ( capture error)

c.       A packet successfully transmitted and received, but dropped by the higher networking layer.

4)       The timestamp errors.

5)       What was the backoff after which the transmitter retried?

6)       NAV violations.

 

I would basically like to code a special reporting tool/ plugin ( under the statistics tab as detected violations/ deviations) which captures and reports whenever there is a deviation from the ideal behavior in real time on per protocol basis( I would also like a popup-window or bell alert).

 

My queries where:

1) Does ethereal have a code base which could be used/ extended for this purpose?

2) Where exactly to put the interface? As a plugin or with the dissectors?

3) I would love if you guys could actually come up with the features requirements and save the time spend going through all the packets in pin-pointing the deviations.

4) Does implementing a FSM on per address pair solve our problem?

 

Regards,

Ankur