Wireshark Wireshark - 2.9 User Guide

Wireshark User’s Guide

Version 2.9.0

Preface

Foreword

Wireshark is one of those programs that many network managers would love to be able to use, but they are often prevented from getting what they would like from Wireshark because of the lack of documentation.

This document is part of an effort by the Wireshark team to improve the usability of Wireshark.

We hope that you find it useful and look forward to your comments.

Who should read this document?

The intended audience of this book is anyone using Wireshark.

This book will explain all the basics and also some of the advanced features that Wireshark provides. As Wireshark has become a very complex program since the early days, not every feature of Wireshark may be explained in this book.

This book is not intended to explain network sniffing in general and it will not provide details about specific network protocols. A lot of useful information regarding these topics can be found at the Wireshark Wiki at https://wiki.wireshark.org/.

By reading this book, you will learn how to install Wireshark, how to use the basic elements of the graphical user interface (such as the menu) and what’s behind some of the advanced features that are not always obvious at first sight. It will hopefully guide you around some common problems that frequently appear for new (and sometimes even advanced) users of Wireshark.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the whole Wireshark team for their assistance. In particular, the authors would like to thank:

• Gerald Combs, for initiating the Wireshark project and funding to do this documentation.

• Guy Harris, for many helpful hints and a great deal of patience in reviewing this document.

• Gilbert Ramirez, for general encouragement and helpful hints along the way.

The authors would also like to thank the following people for their helpful feedback on this document:

• Pat Eyler, for his suggestions on improving the example on generating a backtrace.

• Martin Regner, for his various suggestions and corrections.

• Graeme Hewson, for a lot of grammatical corrections.

The authors would like to acknowledge those man page and README authors for the Wireshark project from who sections of this document borrow heavily:

• Scott Renfro from whose mergecap man page mergecap: Merging multiple capture files into one

is derived.

• Ashok Narayanan from whose text2pcap man page text2pcap: Converting ASCII hexdumps to

network captures is derived.

About this document

This book was originally developed by Richard Sharpe with funds provided from the Wireshark Fund. It was updated by Ed Warnicke and more recently redesigned and updated by Ulf Lamping.

It was originally written in DocBook/XML and converted to AsciiDoc by Gerald Combs.

Where to get the latest copy of this document?

The latest copy of this documentation can always be found at https://www.wireshark.org/docs/.

Providing feedback about this document

Should you have any feedback about this document, please send it to the authors through

wireshark-dev[AT]wireshark.org.

Typographic Conventions

The following table shows the typographic conventions that are used in this guide.

Table 1. Typographic Conventions

Style Description Example

Italic File names, folder names, and extensions C:\Development\wireshark.

Monospace

Bold Monospace

Commands, flags, and environment variables

Commands that should be run by the user

CMake’s -G option.

Run cmake -G Ninja ...

[ Button ] Dialog and window buttons Press [ Launch ] to go to the Moon.

Key

Menu Menu item

Keyboard shortcut Press Ctrl+Down to move to the next

packet.

Select Go › Next Packet to move to the next packet.

Admonitions

Important and notable items are marked as follows:

This is a warning

WARNING

NOTE

This is a tip

TIP

Tips are helpful for your everyday work using Wireshark.

You should pay attention to a warning, otherwise data loss might occur.

This is a note

A note will point you to common mistakes and things that might not be obvious.

Shell Prompt and Source Code Examples

Bourne shell, normal user

$ # This is a comment $ git config --global log.abbrevcommit true

Bourne shell, root user

# # This is a comment # ninja install

Command Prompt (cmd.exe)

>rem This is a comment >cd C:\Development

PowerShell

PS$># This is a comment PS$>choco list -l

C Source Code

#include "config.h"

/* This method dissects foos */ static int dissect_foo_message(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo _U_, proto_tree *tree _U_, void *data _U_) { Ê /* TODO: implement your dissecting code */ Ê return tvb_captured_length(tvb); }

Introduction

What is Wireshark?

Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible.

You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what’s going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what’s going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course).

In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed.

Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.

Some intended purposes

Here are some examples people use Wireshark for:

• Network administrators use it to troubleshoot network problems

• Network security engineers use it to examine security problems

• QA engineers use it to verify network applications

• Developers use it to debug protocol implementations

• People use it to learn network protocol internals

Beside these examples Wireshark can be helpful in many other situations too.

Features

The following are some of the many features Wireshark provides:

• Available for UNIX and Windows.

• Capture live packet data from a network interface.

• Open files containing packet data captured with tcpdump/WinDump, Wireshark, and a number of other packet capture programs.

• Import packets from text files containing hex dumps of packet data.

• Display packets with very detailed protocol information.

• Save packet data captured.

• Export some or all packets in a number of capture file formats.

• Filter packets on many criteria.

• Search for packets on many criteria.

• Colorize packet display based on filters.

• Create various statistics.

• …and a lot more!

However, to really appreciate its power you have to start using it.

Wireshark captures packets and lets you examine their contents. shows Wireshark having captured

some packets and waiting for you to examine them.

Figure 1. Wireshark captures packets and lets you examine their contents.

Live capture from many different network media

Wireshark can capture traffic from many different network media types - and despite its name including wireless LAN as well. Which media types are supported, depends on many things like the operating system you are using. An overview of the supported media types can be found at

https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/NetworkMedia.

Import files from many other capture programs

Wireshark can open packets captured from a large number of other capture programs. For a list of input formats see Input File Formats.

Export files for many other capture programs

Wireshark can save packets captured in a large number of formats of other capture programs. For a list of output formats see Output File Formats.

Many protocol dissectors

There are protocol dissectors (or decoders, as they are known in other products) for a great many protocols: see Protocols and Protocol Fields.

Open Source Software

Wireshark is an open source software project, and is released under the GNU General Public

License (GPL). You can freely use Wireshark on any number of computers you like, without

worrying about license keys or fees or such. In addition, all source code is freely available under the GPL. Because of that, it is very easy for people to add new protocols to Wireshark, either as plugins, or built into the source, and they often do!

What Wireshark is not

Here are some things Wireshark does not provide:

• Wireshark isn’t an intrusion detection system. It will not warn you when someone does strange things on your network that he/she isn’t allowed to do. However, if strange things happen, Wireshark might help you figure out what is really going on.

• Wireshark will not manipulate things on the network, it will only “measure” things from it. Wireshark doesn’t send packets on the network or do other active things (except for name resolutions, but even that can be disabled).

System Requirements

The amount of resources Wireshark needs depends on your environment and on the size of the capture file you are analyzing. The values below should be fine for small to medium-sized capture files no more than a few hundred MB. Larger capture files will require more memory and disk space.

Busy networks mean large captures

Working with a busy network can easily produce huge capture files. Capturing on a

NOTE

gigabit or even 100 megabit network can produce hundreds of megabytes of capture data in a short time. A fast processor, lots of memory and disk space is always a good idea.

If Wireshark runs out of memory it will crash. See https://wiki.wireshark.org/KnownBugs/

OutOfMemory for details and workarounds.

Although Wireshark captures packets using a separate process the main interface is singlethreaded and won’t benefit much from multi-core systems.

Microsoft Windows

• The current version of Wireshark should support any version of Windows that is still within its

extended support lifetime. At the time of writing this includes Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, Server

2016, Server 2012 R2, Server 2012, Server 2008 R2, and Server 2008.

• Any modern 64-bit AMD64/x86-64 or 32-bit x86 processor.

• 400 MB available RAM. Larger capture files require more RAM.

• 300 MB available disk space. Capture files require additional disk space.

• 1024 × 768 (1280 × 1024 or higher recommended) resolution with at least 16-bit color. 8-bit color should work but user experience will be degraded. Power users will find multiple monitors useful.

• A supported network card for capturing

◦ Ethernet. Any card supported by Windows should work. See the wiki pages on Ethernet

capture and offloading for issues that may affect your environment.

◦ 802.11. See the Wireshark wiki page. Capturing raw 802.11 information may be difficult

without special equipment.

◦ Other media. See https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/NetworkMedia.

Older versions of Windows which are outside Microsoft’s extended lifecycle support window are no longer supported. It is often difficult or impossible to support these systems due to circumstances beyond our control, such as third party libraries on which we depend or due to necessary features that are only present in newer versions of Windows (such as hardened security or memory management).

Wireshark 1.12 was the last release branch to support Windows Server 2003. Wireshark 1.10 was the last branch to officially support Windows XP. See the Wireshark release lifecycle page for more details.

UNIX / Linux

Wireshark runs on most UNIX and UNIX-like platforms including macOS and Linux. The system requirements should be comparable to the Windows values listed above.

Binary packages are available for most Unices and Linux distributions including the following platforms:

• Apple macOS

• Debian GNU/Linux

• FreeBSD

• Gentoo Linux

• HP-UX

• Mandriva Linux

• NetBSD

• OpenPKG

• Red Hat Enterprise/Fedora Linux

• Sun Solaris/i386

• Sun Solaris/SPARC

• Canonical Ubuntu

If a binary package is not available for your platform you can download the source and try to build it. Please report your experiences to wireshark-dev[AT]wireshark.org.

Where to get Wireshark

You can get the latest copy of the program from the Wireshark website at

https://www.wireshark.org/download.html. The download page should automatically highlight the

appropriate download for your platform and direct you to the nearest mirror. Official Windows and macOS installers are signed by the Wireshark Foundation.

A new Wireshark version typically becomes available each month or two.

If you want to be notified about new Wireshark releases you should subscribe to the wiresharkannounce mailing list. You will find more details in Mailing Lists.

A 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 days 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.

Development and maintenance of Wireshark

Wireshark was initially developed by Gerald Combs. Ongoing development and maintenance of Wireshark is handled by the Wireshark team, a loose group of individuals who fix bugs and provide new functionality.

There have also been a large number of people who have contributed protocol dissectors to Wireshark, and it is expected that this will continue. You can find a list of the people who have contributed code to Wireshark by checking the about dialog box of Wireshark, or at the authors page on the Wireshark web site.

Wireshark is an open source software project, and is released under the GNU General Public

License (GPL) version 2. All source code is freely available under the GPL. You are welcome to

modify Wireshark to suit your own needs, and it would be appreciated if you contribute your improvements back to the Wireshark team.

You gain three benefits by contributing your improvements back to the community:

1. Other people who find your contributions useful will appreciate them, and you will know that you have helped people in the same way that the developers of Wireshark have helped people.

2. The developers of Wireshark might improve your changes even more, as there’s always room for improvement. Or they may implement some advanced things on top of your code, which can be useful for yourself too.

3. The maintainers and developers of Wireshark will maintain your code as well, fixing it when API changes or other changes are made, and generally keeping it in tune with what is happening with Wireshark. So if Wireshark is updated (which is done often), you can get a new Wireshark version from the website and your changes will already be included without any effort for you.

The Wireshark source code and binary kits for some platforms are all available on the download page of the Wireshark website: https://www.wireshark.org/download.html.

Reporting problems and getting help

If you have problems or need help with Wireshark there are several places that may be of interest to you (well, besides this guide of course).

Website

You will find lots of useful information on the Wireshark homepage at https://www.wireshark.org/.

Wiki

The Wireshark Wiki at https://wiki.wireshark.org/ provides a wide range of information related to Wireshark and packet capture in general. You will find a lot of information not part of this user’s guide. For example, there is an explanation how to capture on a switched network, an ongoing effort to build a protocol reference and a lot more.

And best of all, if you would like to contribute your knowledge on a specific topic (maybe a network protocol you know well) you can edit the wiki pages by simply using your web browser.

Q&A Site

The Wireshark Q&A site at https://ask.wireshark.org/ offers a resource where questions and answers come together. You have the option to search what questions were asked before and what answers were given by people who knew about the issue. Answers are graded, so you can pick out the best ones easily. If your question hasn’t been discussed before you can post one yourself.

FAQ

The Frequently Asked Questions lists often asked questions and their corresponding answers.

Read the FAQ

NOTE

You will find the FAQ inside Wireshark by clicking the menu item Help/Contents and selecting the FAQ page in the dialog shown.

Before sending any mail to the mailing lists below, be sure to read the FAQ. It will often answer any questions you might have. This will save yourself and others a lot of time. Keep in mind that a lot of people are subscribed to the mailing lists.

An online version is available at the Wireshark website at https://www.wireshark.org/faq.html. You might prefer this online version, as it’s typically more up to date and the HTML format is easier to use.

Mailing Lists

There are several mailing lists of specific Wireshark topics available:

wireshark-announce

This mailing list will inform you about new program releases, which usually appear about every 4-8 weeks.

wireshark-users

This list is for users of Wireshark. People post questions about building and using Wireshark, others (hopefully) provide answers.

wireshark-dev

This list is for Wireshark developers. If you want to start developing a protocol dissector, join this list.

You can subscribe to each of these lists from the Wireshark web site: https://www.wireshark.org/

lists/. From there, you can choose which mailing list you want to subscribe to by clicking on the

Subscribe/Unsubscribe/Options button under the title of the relevant list. The links to the archives are included on that page as well.

The lists are archived

TIP

You can search in the list archives to see if someone asked the same question some time before and maybe already got an answer. That way you don’t have to wait until someone answers your question.

Reporting Problems

NOTE

When reporting problems with Wireshark please supply the following information:

1. The version number of Wireshark and the dependent libraries linked with it, such as Qt or GLib. You can obtain this from Wireshark’s about box or the command wireshark -v.

2. Information about the platform you run Wireshark on.

3. A detailed description of your problem.

4. If you get an error/warning message, copy the text of that message (and also a few lines before and after it, if there are some) so others may find the place where things go wrong. Please don’t give something like: “I get a warning while doing x” as this won’t give a good idea where to look.

Before reporting any problems, please make sure you have installed the latest version of Wireshark.

NOTE

Don’t send large files

Do not send large files (> 1 MB) to the mailing lists. Just place a note that further data is available on request. Large files will only annoy a lot of people on the list who are not interested in your specific problem. If required you will be asked for further data by the persons who really can help you.

Don’t send confidential information!

WARNING

If you send capture files to the mailing lists be sure they don’t contain any sensitive or confidential information like passwords or personally identifiable information (PII).

Reporting Crashes on UNIX/Linux platforms

When reporting crashes with Wireshark it is helpful if you supply the traceback information along with the information mentioned in “Reporting Problems”.

You can obtain this traceback information with the following commands on UNIX or Linux (note the backticks):

$ gdb `whereis wireshark | cut -f2 -d: | cut -d' ' -f2` core >& backtrace.txt backtrace ^D

If you do not have gdb available, you will have to check out your operating system’s debugger.

Mail backtrace.txt to wireshark-dev[AT]wireshark.org.

Reporting Crashes on Windows platforms

The Windows distributions don’t contain the symbol files (.pdb) because they are very large. You can download them separately at https://www.wireshark.org/download/win32/all-versions/ and

https://www.wireshark.org/download/win64/all-versions/ .

Building and Installing Wireshark

Introduction

As with all things there must be a beginning and so it is with Wireshark. To use Wireshark you must first install it. If you are running Windows or macOS you can download an official release at

https://www.wireshark.org/download.html, install it, and skip the rest of this chapter.

If you are running another operating system such as Linux or FreeBSD you might want to install from source. Several Linux distributions offer Wireshark packages but they commonly ship out-ofdate versions. No other versions of UNIX ship Wireshark so far. For that reason, you will need to know where to get the latest version of Wireshark and how to install it.

This chapter shows you how to obtain source and binary packages and how to build Wireshark from source should you choose to do so.

The following are the general steps you would use:

1. Download the relevant package for your needs, e.g. source or binary distribution.

2. Compile the source into a binary if needed. This may involve building and/or installing other necessary packages.

3. Install the binaries into their final destinations.

Obtaining the source and binary distributions

You can obtain both source and binary distributions from the Wireshark web site:

https://www.wireshark.org/download.html. Select the download link and then select the desired

binary or source package.

Download all required files

If you are building Wireshark from source you will In general, unless you have

NOTE

Once you have downloaded the relevant files, you can go on to the next step.

already downloaded Wireshark before, you will most likely need to download several source packages if you are building Wireshark from source. This is covered in more detail below.

Installing Wireshark under Windows

Windows installer names contain the platform and version. For example, Wireshark-win64-

2.9.0.exe installs Wireshark 2.9.0 for 64-bit Windows. The Wireshark installer includes WinPcap which is required for packet capture.

Simply download the Wireshark installer from https://www.wireshark.org/download.html and execute it. Official packages are signed by the Wireshark Foundation. You can choose to install several optional components and select the location of the installed package. The default settings are recommended for most users.

Installation Components

On the Choose Components page of the installer you can select from the following:

• Wireshark - The network protocol analyzer that we all know and mostly love.

• TShark - A command-line network protocol analyzer. If you haven’t tried it you should.

• Plugins & Extensions - Extras for the Wireshark and TShark dissection engines

◦ Dissector Plugins - Plugins with some extended dissections.

◦ Tree Statistics Plugins - Extended statistics.

◦ Mate - Meta Analysis and Tracing Engine - User configurable extension(s) of the display

filter engine, see MATE for details.

◦ SNMP MIBs - SNMP MIBs for a more detailed SNMP dissection.

• Tools - Additional command line tools to work with capture files

◦ Editcap - Reads a capture file and writes some or all of the packets into another capture file.

◦ Text2Pcap - Reads in an ASCII hex dump and writes the data into a pcap capture file.

◦ Reordercap - Reorders a capture file by timestamp.

◦ Mergecap - Combines multiple saved capture files into a single output file.

◦ Capinfos - Provides information on capture files.

◦ Rawshark - Raw packet filter.

• User’s Guide - Local installation of the User’s Guide. The Help buttons on most dialogs will

require an internet connection to show help pages if the User’s Guide is not installed locally.

Additional Tasks

• Start Menu Shortcuts - Add some start menu shortcuts.

• Desktop Icon - Add a Wireshark icon to the desktop.

• Quick Launch Icon - add a Wireshark icon to the Explorer quick launch toolbar.

• Associate file extensions to Wireshark - Associate standard network trace files to Wireshark.

Install Location

By default Wireshark installs into %ProgramFiles%\Wireshark on 32-bit Windows and

%ProgramFiles64%\Wireshark on 64-bit Windows. This expands to C:\Program Files\Wireshark on

most systems.

Installing WinPcap

The Wireshark installer contains the latest WinPcap installer.

If you don’t have WinPcap installed you won’t be able to capture live network traffic but you will still be able to open saved capture files. By default the latest version of WinPcap will be installed. If you don’t wish to do this or if you wish to reinstall WinPcap you can check the Install WinPcap box as needed.

For more information about WinPcap see https://www.winpcap.org/ and https://wiki.wireshark.org/

WinPcap.

Windows installer command line options

For special cases, there are some command line parameters available:

• /S runs the installer or uninstaller silently with default values. The silent installer will not

install WinPCap.

• /desktopicon installation of the desktop icon, =yes - force installation, =no - don’t install,

otherwise use default settings. This option can be useful for a silent installer.

• /quicklaunchicon installation of the quick launch icon, =yes - force installation, =no - don’t install,

otherwise use default settings.

• /D sets the default installation directory ($INSTDIR), overriding InstallDir and InstallDirRegKey.

It must be the last parameter used in the command line and must not contain any quotes even if the path contains spaces.

• /NCRC disables the CRC check. We recommend against using this flag.

Example:

> Wireshark-win64-wireshark-2.0.5.exe /NCRC /S /desktopicon=yes /quicklaunchicon=no /D=C:\Program Files\Foo

Running the installer without any parameters shows the normal interactive installer.

Manual WinPcap Installation

As mentioned above, the Wireshark installer takes care of installing WinPcap. The following is only necessary if you want to use a different version than the one included in the Wireshark installer, e.g. because a new WinPcap version was released.

Additional WinPcap versions (including newer alpha or beta releases) can be downloaded from the main WinPcap site at https://www.winpcap.org/. The Installer for Windows supports modern Windows operating systems.

Update Wireshark

By default the offical Windows package will check for new versions and notify you when they are available. If you have the Check for updates preference disabled or if you run Wireshark in an isolated environment you should subcribe to the wireshark-announce mailing list. See Mailing Lists for details on subscribing to this list.

New versions of Wireshark are usually released every four to six weeks. Updating Wireshark is done the same way as installing it. Simply download and start the installer exe. A reboot is usually not required and all your personal settings remain unchanged.

Update WinPcap

New versions of WinPcap are less frequently available. You will find WinPcap update instructions the WinPcap web site at https://www.winpcap.org/. You may have to reboot your machine after installing a new WinPcap version.

Uninstall Wireshark

You can uninstall Wireshark using the Programs and Features control panel. Select the “Wireshark” entry to start the uninstallation procedure.

The Wireshark uninstaller provides several options for removal. The default is to remove the core components but keep your personal settings and WinPcap. WinPcap is left installed by default in case other programs need it.

Uninstall WinPcap

You can uninstall WinPcap independently of Wireshark using the WinPcap entry in the Programs and Features control panel. Remember that if you uninstall WinPcap you won’t be able to capture

anything with Wireshark.

Installing Wireshark under macOS

The official macOS packages are distributed as disk images (.dmg) containing the application installer. To install Wireshark simply open the disk image and run the enclosed installer.

The installer package includes Wireshark, its related command line utilities, and a launch daemon that adjusts capture permissions at system startup. See the included Read me first file for more details.

Building Wireshark from source under UNIX

Building Wireshark requires the proper build environment including a compiler and many supporting libraries. See the Developer’s Guide at https://www.wireshark.org/docs/ for more

information.

Use the following general steps to build Wireshark from source under UNIX or Linux:

1. Unpack the source from its compressed tar file. If you are using Linux or your version of UNIX uses GNU tar you can use the following command:

$ tar xaf wireshark-2.9.0.tar.xz

In other cases you will have to use the following commands:

$ xz -d wireshark-2.9.0.tar.xz $ tar xf wireshark-2.9.0.tar

2. Create a directory to build Wireshark in and change to it.

$ mkdir build $ cd build

3. Configure your source so it will build correctly for your version of UNIX. You can do this with the following command:

$ cmake ../wireshark-2.9.0

If this step fails you will have to look into the logs and rectify the problems, then rerun cmake. Troubleshooting hints are provided in Troubleshooting during the build and install on Unix.

4. Build the sources.

$ make

Once you have build Wireshark with make above, you should be able to run it by entering

run/wireshark.

5. Install the software in its final destination.

$ make install

Once you have installed Wireshark with make install above, you should be able to run it by entering wireshark.

Installing the binaries under UNIX

In general installing the binary under your version of UNIX will be specific to the installation methods used with your version of UNIX. For example, under AIX, you would use smit to install the Wireshark binary package, while under Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX) you would use setld.

Installing from RPMs under Red Hat and alike

Building RPMs from Wireshark’s source code results in several packages (most distributions follow the same system):

• The wireshark package contains the core Wireshark libraries and command-line tools.

• The wireshark or wireshark-qt package contains the Qt-based GUI.

Many distributions use yum or a similar package management tool to make installation of software (including its dependencies) easier. If your distribution uses yum, use the following command to install Wireshark together with the Qt GUI:

yum install wireshark wireshark-qt

If you’ve built your own RPMs from the Wireshark sources you can install them by running, for example:

rpm -ivh wireshark-2.0.0-1.x86_64.rpm wireshark-qt-2.0.0-1.x86_64.rpm

If the above command fails because of missing dependencies, install the dependencies first, and then retry the step above.

Installing from debs under Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives

If you can just install from the repository then use

$ aptitude install wireshark

Aptitude should take care of all of the dependency issues for you.

Use the following command to install downloaded Wireshark debs under Debian:

$ dpkg -i wireshark-common_2.0.5.0-1_i386.deb wireshark_wireshark-2.0.5.0-1_i386.deb

dpkg doesn’t take care of all dependencies, but reports what’s missing.

Capturing requires privileges

NOTE

By installing Wireshark packages non-root users won’t gain rights automatically to capture packets. To allow non-root users to capture packets follow the procedure described in /usr/share/doc/wireshark-common/README.Debian

Installing from portage under Gentoo Linux

Use the following command to install Wireshark under Gentoo Linux with all of the extra features:

$ USE="c-ares ipv6 snmp ssl kerberos threads selinux" emerge wireshark

Installing from packages under FreeBSD

Use the following command to install Wireshark under FreeBSD:

$ pkg_add -r wireshark

pkg_add should take care of all of the dependency issues for you.

Troubleshooting during the build and install on Unix

A number of errors can occur during the build and installation process. Some hints on solving these are provided here.

If the cmake stage fails you will need to find out why. You can check the file CMakeOutput.log and

CMakeError.log in the build directory to find out what failed. The last few lines of this file should

help in determining the problem.

The standard problems are that you do not have a required development package on your system or that the development package isn’t new enough. Note that installing a library package isn’t enough. You need to install its development package as well. cmake will also fail if you do not have libpcap (at least the required include files) on your system.

If you cannot determine what the problems are, send an email to the wireshark-dev mailing list explaining your problem. Include the output from cmake and anything else you think is relevant such as a trace of the make stage.

Building from source under Windows

We strongly recommended that you use the binary installer for Windows unless you want to start developing Wireshark on the Windows platform.

For further information how to build Wireshark for Windows from the sources see the Developer’s Guide at https://www.wireshark.org/docs/.

You may also want to have a look at the Development Wiki (https://wiki.wireshark.org/

Development) for the latest available development documentation.

User Interface

Introduction

By now you have installed Wireshark and are most likely keen to get started capturing your first packets. In the next chapters we will explore:

• How the Wireshark user interface works

• How to capture packets in Wireshark

• How to view packets in Wireshark

• How to filter packets in Wireshark

• … and many other things!

Start Wireshark

You can start Wireshark from your shell or window manager.

Power user tip

TIP

In the following chapters a lot of screenshots from Wireshark will be shown. As Wireshark runs on many different platforms with many different window managers, different styles applied and there are different versions of the underlying GUI toolkit used, your screen might look different from the provided screenshots. But as there are no real differences in functionality these screenshots should still be well understandable.

When starting Wireshark it’s possible to specify optional settings using the command line. See Start Wireshark from the command line for details.

The Main window

Let’s look at Wireshark’s user interface. The Main window shows Wireshark as you would usually see it after some packets are captured or loaded (how to do this will be described later).

Figure 2. The Main window

Wireshark’s main window consists of parts that are commonly known from many other GUI programs.

1. The menu (see The Menu) is used to start actions.

2. The main toolbar (see The “Main” Toolbar) provides quick access to frequently used items from the menu.

3. The filter toolbar (see The “Filter” Toolbar) provides a way to directly manipulate the currently used display filter (see Filtering packets while viewing).

4. The packet list pane (see The “Packet List” Pane) displays a summary of each packet captured. By clicking on packets in this pane you control what is displayed in the other two panes.

5. The packet details pane (see The “Packet Details” Pane) displays the packet selected in the packet list pane in more detail.

6. The packet bytes pane (see The “Packet Bytes” Pane) displays the data from the packet selected in the packet list pane, and highlights the field selected in the packet details pane.

7. The statusbar (see The Statusbar) shows some detailed information about the current program state and the captured data.

TIP

The layout of the main window can be customized by changing preference settings. See Preferences for details!

Main Window Navigation

Packet list and detail navigation can be done entirely from the keyboard. Keyboard Navigation shows a list of keystrokes that will let you quickly move around a capture file. See Go menu items for additional navigation keystrokes.

Table 2. Keyboard Navigation

Accelerator Description

Tab or Shift+Tab Move between screen elements, e.g. from the toolbars to the packet list to

the packet detail.

↓

↑

Ctrl+↓ or F8 Move to the next packet, even if the packet list isn’t focused.

Ctrl+↑ or F7 Move to the previous packet, even if the packet list isn’t focused.

Ctrl+. Move to the next packet of the conversation (TCP, UDP or IP).

Ctrl+, Move to the previous packet of the conversation (TCP, UDP or IP).

Alt+→ or Option+→

(macOS)

Alt+← or Option+←

(macOS)

←

→

Shift+→ In the packet detail, opens the selected tree item and all of its subtrees.

Ctrl+→ In the packet detail, opens all tree items.

Ctrl+← In the packet detail, closes all tree items.

Move to the next packet or detail item.

Move to the previous packet or detail item.

Move to the next packet in the selection history.

Move to the previous packet in the selection history.

In the packet detail, closes the selected tree item. If it’s already closed, jumps to the parent node.

In the packet detail, opens the selected tree item.

Backspace

Return or Enter In the packet detail, toggles the selected tree item.

Help › About Wireshark › Keyboard Shortcuts will show a list of all shortcuts in the main window. Additionally, typing anywhere in the main window will start filling in a display filter.

In the packet detail, jumps to the parent node.

The Menu

Wireshark’s main menu is located either at the top of the main window (Windows, Linux) or at the top of your main screen (macOS). An example is shown in The Menu.

Some menu items will be disabled (greyed out) if the corresponding feature isn’t

NOTE

available. For example, you cannot save a capture file if you haven’t captured or loaded any packets.

Figure 3. The Menu

The main menu contains the following items:

File

This menu contains items to open and merge capture files, save, print, or export capture files in whole or in part, and to quit the Wireshark application. See The “File” menu.

Edit

This menu contains items to find a packet, time reference or mark one or more packets, handle configuration profiles, and set your preferences; (cut, copy, and paste are not presently implemented). See The “Edit” Menu.

View

This menu controls the display of the captured data, including colorization of packets, zooming the font, showing a packet in a separate window, expanding and collapsing trees in packet details, …. See The “View” Menu.

This menu contains items to go to a specific packet. See The “Go” Menu.

Capture

This menu allows you to start and stop captures and to edit capture filters. See The “Capture”

menu.

Analyze

This menu contains items to manipulate display filters, enable or disable the dissection of protocols, configure user specified decodes and follow a TCP stream. See The “Analyze” Menu.

Statistics

This menu contains items to display various statistic windows, including a summary of the packets that have been captured, display protocol hierarchy statistics and much more. See The

“Statistics” Menu.

Telephony

This menu contains items to display various telephony related statistic windows, including a media analysis, flow diagrams, display protocol hierarchy statistics and much more. See The

“Telephony” Menu.

Wireless

The items in this menu show Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 wireless statistics.

Tools

This menu contains various tools available in Wireshark, such as creating Firewall ACL Rules.

See The “Tools” Menu.

Help

This menu contains items to help the user, e.g. access to some basic help, manual pages of the various command line tools, online access to some of the webpages, and the usual about dialog. See The “Help” Menu.

Each of these menu items is described in more detail in the sections that follow.

Shortcuts make life easier

TIP

Most common menu items have keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can press the Control (or Strg in German) and the K keys together to open the “Capture Options” dialog.

The “File” menu

The Wireshark file menu contains the fields shown in File menu items.

Figure 4. The “File” Menu

Table 3. File menu items

Menu Item Accelerator Description

Open… Ctrl+O This shows the file open dialog box that allows

you to load a capture file for viewing. It is discussed in more detail in The “Open Capture

File” dialog box.

Open Recent This lets you open recently opened capture files.

Clicking on one of the submenu items will open the corresponding capture file directly.

Merge… This menu item lets you merge a capture file

into the currently loaded one. It is discussed in more detail in Merging capture files.

Import from Hex Dump… This menu item brings up the import file dialog

box that allows you to import a text file containing a hex dump into a new temporary capture. It is discussed in more detail in Import

hex dump.

Close Ctrl+W This menu item closes the current capture. If

you haven’t saved the capture, you will be asked to do so first (this can be disabled by a preference setting).

Save Ctrl+S This menu item saves the current capture. If you

have not set a default capture file name (perhaps with the -w <capfile> option), Wireshark pops up the Save Capture File As dialog box (which is discussed further in The

“Save Capture File As” dialog box).

If you have already saved the current capture, this menu item will be greyed out.

You cannot save a live capture while the capture is in progress. You must stop the capture in order to save.

Save As… Shift+Ctrl+S This menu item allows you to save the current

capture file to whatever file you would like. It pops up the Save Capture File As dialog box (which is discussed further in The “Save Capture

File As” dialog box).

File Set › List Files

This menu item allows you to show a list of files in a file set. It pops up the Wireshark List File Set dialog box (which is discussed further in File

Sets).

Menu Item Accelerator Description

File Set › Next File

File Set › Previous File

Export Specified Packets… This menu item allows you to export all (or

Export Packet Dissections…

Export Objects These menu items allow you to export captured

Ctrl+H These menu items allow you to export the

If the currently loaded file is part of a file set, jump to the next file in the set. If it isn’t part of a file set or just the last file in that set, this item is greyed out.

If the currently loaded file is part of a file set, jump to the previous file in the set. If it isn’t part of a file set or just the first file in that set, this item is greyed out.

some) of the packets in the capture file to file. It pops up the Wireshark Export dialog box (which is discussed further in Exporting data).

currently selected bytes in the packet bytes pane to a text file file in a number of formats including plain, CSV, and XML. It is discussed further in The “Export selected packet bytes”

dialog box.

DICOM, HTTP, IMF, SMB, or TFTP objects into local files. It pops up a corresponding object list (which is discussed further in The “Export

Objects” dialog box)

Print… Ctrl+P This menu item allows you to print all (or some)

of the packets in the capture file. It pops up the Wireshark Print dialog box (which is discussed further in Printing packets).

Quit Ctrl+Q This menu item allows you to quit from

Wireshark. Wireshark will ask to save your capture file if you haven’t previously saved it (this can be disabled by a preference setting).

The “Edit” Menu

The Wireshark Edit menu contains the fields shown in Edit menu items.

Figure 5. The “Edit” Menu

Table 4. Edit menu items

Menu Item Accelerator Description

Copy These menu items will copy the packet list,

packet detail, or properties of the currently selected packet to the clipboard.

Find Packet… Ctrl+F This menu item brings up a toolbar that allows

you to find a packet by many criteria. There is further information on finding packets in

Finding packets.

Find Next Ctrl+N This menu item tries to find the next packet

matching the settings from “Find Packet…”.

Find Previous Ctrl+B This menu item tries to find the previous packet

matching the settings from “Find Packet…”.

Mark/Unmark Packet Ctrl+M This menu item marks the currently selected

packet. See Marking packets for details.

Mark All Displayed Packets Shift+Ctrl+M This menu item marks all displayed packets.

Unmark All Displayed

Ctrl+Alt+M This menu item unmarks all displayed packets.

Packets

Next Mark Shift+Alt+N Find the next marked packet.

Previous Mark Shift+Alt+B Find the previous marked packet.

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