Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] [ACL][firewall] how to

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:45:45 -0700

On Apr 14, 2009, at 2:26 PM, Mihai Bucicoiu wrote:

I know some of the wireshark test, and in this first 2 months step I only what to implemnt just the simple ones. Validating MAC addresses, IP , port , ICMP and established sessions. I know that it is possible to filter traffic by this syntax. The reason for choosing Wireshark was that everyone can write on the filter toolbar "ymsg", and then add a rule to block this traffic, and only technical peoples can make a iptable/cisco ACL to block it.

The filter "ymsg" matches all packets that Wireshark identifies as Yahoo Messenger packets.

Wireshark identifies as Yahoo Messenger packets TCP segments that begin with "YMSG" - *AND* any subsequent TCP segments that continue the last packet of the segment. It does *not* identify them based on port numbers.

That would be difficult to turn into a filter rule in any case, especially if your filter rules can't test packet content - and even harder, given that there's no guarantee that all Yahoo Messenger packets begin with "YMSG", as they might continue a Yahoo Messenger packet split across TCP segments.

Furthermore, there's nothing in the filter expression code that even knows about identifying Yahoo Messenger packets based on the contents - the only way to know that's how it identifies packets as Yahoo Messenger packets is to look at the source code of Wireshark's Yahoo Messenger dissector.