Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] "Process Information" task from GSOC2013

From: Костадин Хаџибанов <hadzhibanov.kostadin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2013 18:09:51 +0000
Hello,

I'm contacting you with an intent to request some further info about the task "Process Information" as found on the Wireshark's Google Summer of Code 2013 project page.

After a short research on the matter, I cant help but suspect/am getting drawn to the conclusion that this task is too simple for a full project commitment, which is then again challenged by the thought I might be overlooking the complexity of it.

This task seems like it can be done feasibly well by making a call in C to the commands netstat and tasklist on Windows and netstat or ss on Linux and looking up the port given in the Layer 4 packet info in Wireshark in the command output. But I dont know the time efficiency of this, so maybe a direct kernel access would be prefered?

However I noticed that when looking up the port of an UDP packet, the port often closes quicky and cant be found in the table (I recall someone adressing this issue in the bug page given as a reference), so I suppose a solution to this could be a working set data structure, which remembers the set of recently used ports and their PIDs - as to reduce memory consumption. I would appreciate feedback on this idea.

I am also interested about possibly working on the tasks "Packet Editor (UI)" and "Packet Editor (CLI)", which are features I felt were lacking myself since I started using Wireshark.

Kind regards, Kostadin.