Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Using wireshark protocol parsers to build packets

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:04:20 -0800
[Chris] NULL wrote:

My question is, is it possible to use the Wireshark disectors to "build" a trace. What I mean with this is, is it e.q. possible to change values in the Wireshark GUI and then have Wireshark build the binary trace together? I know that in the current version this is not possible, but my question is in general. Is it possible to extend the Wireshark disectors to be able to "build" a trace?

No; that feature's missing from the current version because the infrastructure for it isn't available, not because Wireshark chooses not to implement it.

This is probably significantly more complicated than one might think, especially given packet reassembly. A mechanism to do that would be useful for manually editing packets (e.g., to construct a sequence of packets to replay), as well as for the anonymization feature another person would like to implement - but it'd require architectural work.