Introduction:
Wireshark is the world’s foremost and widely used Network Protocol Analyzer by Ethical Hackers, Network Administrators, and Cyber Security Professionals.
Wireshark is a very easy tool to handle, it sniffs all the packets of a network and gives us facilities to analyze the Packets as per different Protocols.
A little brief History of Wireshark:
In late 1997 Gerald Combs needed a tool for tracking down network problems and wanted to learn more about networking so he started writing Ethereal (the original name of the Wireshark project) as a way to solve both problems.
Ethereal was initially released after several pauses in development in July 1998 as version 0.2.0. Within day’s patches, bug reports, and words of encouragement started arriving and Ethereal was on its way to success.
Not long after that Gilbert Ramirez saw its potential and contributed a low-level dissector to it.
In October, 1998 Guy Harris was looking for something better than tcpview so he started applying patches and contributing dissectors to Ethereal.
In late 1998 Richard Sharpe, who was giving TCP/IP courses, saw its potential on such courses and started looking at it to see if it supported the protocols he needed. While it didn’t at that point new protocols could be easily added. So he started contributing dissectors and contributing patches.
The list of people who have contributed to the project has become very long since then, and almost all of them started with a protocol that they needed that Wireshark or did not already handle. So they copied an existing dissector and contributed the code back to the team.
In 2006 the project moved house and re-emerged under a new name: Wireshark.
In 2008, after ten years of development, Wireshark finally arrived at version 1.0. This release was the first deemed complete, with the minimum features implemented. Its release coincided with the first Wireshark Developer and User Conference, called Sharkfest.
In 2015 Wireshark 2.0 was released, which featured a new user interface.
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So, what features it provides for us?
- Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time
- Live capture and offline analysis
- Standard three-pane packet browser
- Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others
- Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility
- The most powerful display filters in the industry
- Rich VoIP analysis
- Read/write many different capture file formats: tcpdump (libpcap), Pcap NG, Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure
- IDS iplog, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network General Sniffer (compressed and uncompressed), Sniffer
- Pro, and NetXray, Network Instruments Observer, NetScreen snoop, Novell LANalyzer, RADCOM
- WAN/LAN Analyzer, Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor, Tektronix K12xx, Visual Networks Visual UpTime,
- Wild Packets Ether Peek/Token Peek/AiroPeek, and many others
- Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly
- Live data can be read from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame
- Relay, FDDI, and others (depending on your platform)
- Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and
- WPA/WPA2
- Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis
- Output can be exported to XML, PostScript, CSV, or plain text.
Now, what’s new in Wireshark 3.0?
It is widely used for Network Protocol Analyzer and Troubleshoots the network analysis.
Some new features given below from 3.0.0rc1 version is updated:
- The IP map feature (the “Map” button in the “Endpoints” dialog) has been added back in a modernized form.
- The macOS package now ships with Qt 5.12.1. Previously it shipped with Qt 5.9.7.
- The macOS package requires version 10.12 or later. If you’re running an older version of macOS, please use Wireshark 2.6.
Some featured are removed and their supports:
- The legacy (GTK+) user interface has been removed and is no longer supported.
- The portaudio library is no longer needed due to the removal of GTK+.
- Wireshark requires Qt 5.2 or later. Qt 4 is no longer supported.
- Wireshark requires GLib 2.32 or later.
- Wireshark requires GnuTLS 3.2 or later as an optional dependency.
- Building Wireshark requires Python 3.4 or newer, Python 2.7 is unsupported.
- Building Wireshark requires CMake. Autotools is no longer supported.
- TShark’s -z compare option was removed.
- Building with Cygwin is no longer supported on Windows.
For the new version of Wireshark, you can download from here.
For full documentation, you can visit here.