Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Is it time to make Wireshark a native Mac OS X application?

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:53:22 -0700

On Sep 21, 2009, at 11:46 AM, Gerald Combs wrote:

Three minutes after Stephen's mail arrived I received a request from
Laura Chappell for iPhone support.

Unless things have changed since I last had a jailbroken iPhone (and I doubt they have), the BPF devices were just like the OS X ones, defaulting to owned by root/wheel and not readable or writable by anybody other than the owner, and apps don't run as root, so no access to the BPF devices - and probably no chance of any access without jailbreaking - and hence no traffic capture.

Neither the Tiger nor the Leopard/Snow Leopard techniques for putting 802.11 adapters into monitor mode worked, either. That was a while ago, though - it was probably iPhone OS 1.x. Maybe that, at least, has changed.

Keeping the capture process going even if you bring another app forward would be a bit tricky, too, especially without jailbreaking (and even then, the OS reserves the right to terminate background processes if it needs memory - I've even see it terminate Safari, as my browsing history, presumably kept in main memory in pre-3.0 releases, disappeared on occasion after switching to Mail and back to Safari, probably because the Safari process terminated).

The other big question is "how much support?" Making Wireshark - or some subset thereof - usable on a small screen would probably take some work.