Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Capture Filter

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:23:26 -0700

On Apr 24, 2009, at 3:13 PM, gogrady@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I want to be able to use my custom protocol as a capture filter, how do i do this?

Capture filters are implemented by libpcap/WinPcap, not Wireshark, and are limited in their capabilities, as they are implemented by a simple mechanism designed to be capable of being implemented safely in the kernel (so that packets can be filtered out in the kernel and not copied to user space if they don't pass the filter; see

	http://www.tcpdump.org/papers/bpf-usenix93.pdf

for the rationale behind BPF).

See the "expression" section of

	http://www.tcpdump.org/tcpdump_man.html

for a full and complete description of what you can do with capture filters. Unless you can express your desired capture filter in terms of things such as TCP or UDP port numbers, or expressions that might be able to look at the TCP or UDP payload, you cannot create a filter to try to capture only traffic for your protocol.