Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] dissection of packets with unknown format (LDP/MPLS/PWE)
Hi.
Has anyone ever found a case where the successful dissection of one
protocol depends on what was negotiated in another protocol? I've been
looking into dissecting pseudowires running over MPLS but the packet
format can't be obtained by looking just into the MPLS traffic. Per
each MPLS frame/packet, a match has to be made with the labels
negotiated previously by LDP (for those unused to these prots, you can
think of LDP as the signalling protocol for MPLS traffic) to then be
able to map the MPLS traffic into the appropriate RFC. This is the
only way to be able to look into an MPLS packet and decide it is part
of an EoMPLS pseudowire and not part of an IPv4 VPN for example.
Right now, I've changed the MPLS dissector to decode each MPLS frame
into 4 or 5 subtrees, each assuming a different type of traffic and
then I decide which type of traffic I'm most probably looking at based
on my personal analysis of the fields. But this is highly inefficient
and error prone.
I guess my question comes down to: how can we store the information
from dissection of one protocol so that it can be used to dissect
another protocol, while still following wireshark's dev guidelines.
Tks in advance
AA