Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Wireshark and real-time network issue detection?

From: Lars Ruoff <Lars.Ruoff@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:14:51 +0100


frederic heem wrote:
Actually,  I'm looking for the almost the same feature:
The monitor asks tshark to be advised when a packet matches a filter.
As soon as tshark received such a packet, it signals the application that has requested such packet.

That would be a special (trivial) case of my general concept: A filter and a tap which fires the alarm every time it is called.

Some work has already been done. Basicely, it uses the D-Bus protocol as the IPC.

Don't know D-Bus. At the first glance it looks like overkill to me, but why not.

> At the moment, it is able to start and stop the capture, to set the
network interface and the capture filename.

I did this simply via the command line args.
I introduced additional command line args for the special taps.
Style -z my_tap my_tap_arguments

What's remaining is setting the packet filter and signal the application when such a packet is received.
Let me know if you're interested in collaborating on this project.
Frederic Heem

Sure, i am!
(Don't have the time to work full-time on it though)

br,
Lars Ruoff


 From what i can see from a first glance,
- snort provides nearly no means of decoding (and thus creating rules
for) higher level protocols beyond transport layer?
- snort's features for having user-defined decoding extensions are very
limited?
- i can't make rules that track conversations and do
conversation-statefull statistics ?
Wireshark provides all these features.
Also, it is easy to add a new dissector to Wireshark in case i would
like to detect issues on a proprietary protocol for example.
Also, keep in mind that i want to save the *entire* network traffic that
was going on at the time i had the problem, not only the packets i use
for detection of the problem.
But i don't want to log *all* network traffic over all time.

Think of my RTP lost packets example again. If there is an easy way to
do that with snort, i'd love to learn it.

Lars

frederic heem wrote:
Hi,
Did you have a look at www.snort.org ? It may be what you are looking
for. Frederic Heem.

Alle 15:03, lunedì 30 ottobre 2006, Lars Ruoff ha scritto:
Hi list,

I wonder if Wireshark could be extended to provide real-time network
issue detection and if there was any interest in the community to
implement this feature.

Let me explain.
What i would like to have is the following:
Wireshark (tshark to be precise) would be run from another application
(let's call it the Monitor application). There would be a form of
interprocess communication between Wireshark and the latter.
Wireshark would capture packets, decode them and run certain analysis
modules (console style "tap-listeners", as can be activated via the -z
option).
The analysis modules would be designed to detect alarm conditions that
correspond to a certain network troubleshooting issue, for example,
think of a module that monitors RTP voice conversations and reports
whenever there is consecutive packet loss exceeding some threshold.
Whenever an alarm condition is met, Wireshark would notify the Monitor
application, and the latter would save the coresponding capture files.
Wireshark would be run in multiple files option, but the Monitor would
erase every written file after a while if no alarm condition has been
met during that time. Only the capture files containing alarm conditions
would be saved.
The goal is to have the whole thing running over several days/weeks
without filling up the HDD with unnecessary files.

In fact i already have implemented an application that does just that!
It was back on Ethereal 0.10.3 and i had to modify Ethereal in a few
ways: - Include a form of interprocess communication with the calling
Monitor. (was done using Windows IPC, certainly not a good choice, but
it was the fastest possible way for me to do), including an ABI for the
monitoring taps to use it.
- Make Ethereal report whenever it switched to a new capture file.
(- Mayeb other things i don't remember any more)

Problems i had to cope with:
- Ethereal was leaking memory which caused problems when running for
several days. My workaround was to have Monitor relaunch Ethereal every
now and then.

Obviously, keeping up with Wireshark's release frequency is difficult
for me.
That is why i'm asking wether there would be interest in redesigning,
adding and maintaining the Wireshark related part to the Wireshark
source tree?

best regards,
Lars Ruoff
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