Wireshark supports Windows natively via the Windows API. Note that in this documentation and elsewhere we tend to use the terms “Win32”, “Win”, and “Windows” interchangeably to refer to the Windows API. “Win64” refers to the Windows API on 64-bit platforms. Wireshark runs on and can be compiled on the following Windows versions:

Development on Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, Vista, Server 2008, and older versions may be possible but is not supported.

Some versions of Windows support case sensitive directories. We don’t officially support building or running Wireshark in this environment, but we will accept patches to fix any issues that might arise.

Most of Wireshark is implemented in C. A notable exception is the code in ui/qt, which is written in C++.

The typical task for a new Wireshark developer is to extend an existing dissector, or write a new dissector for a specific network protocol. Most dissectors are written in C11, so a good knowledge of C will be sufficient for Wireshark development in almost any case. Dissectors can also be written in Lua, which might be more suitable for your specific needs. As noted above, if you’re going to modify Wireshark’s user interface you will need a knowledge of C++.

Modifying the build system and support tooling might requires knowledge of CMake, Python, PowerShell, Bash, or Perl. Note that these are required to build Wireshark, but not to run it. If Wireshark is installed from a binary package, none of these helper tools are needed on the target system.

Wireshark is an open source software (OSS) 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!

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 community.

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

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

The Wireshark development team would like to make it as easy as possible for people to obtain and use Wireshark. This means that we need to support the software installation systems that different operating systems provide. We currently offer the following types of precompiled packages as part of each official release:

Most Linux and UNIX distributions have their own packaging systems which usually include Wireshark. The Wireshark sources include support for creating the following types of packages:

You can also create your own binary packages. See Section 3.11, “Binary Packaging” for details.

Wireshark is and will always be open source. You’re welcome to download a source tarball, build it, and modify it under the terms of the GPLv2. However, it’s usually much easier to use a binary package if you want to get up and running quickly in a production environment.

Source tarballs are commonly used for building the binary packages for UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. However, if you are going to modify the Wireshark sources, e.g. to contribute changes back or to develop an in-house version of Wireshark we recommend that you use the latest Git sources. For details about the different ways to get the Wireshark source code see Section 3.4, “Obtaining The Wireshark Sources”.

Before building Wireshark from a source distribution, make sure you have all the tools and libraries required to build. Later chapters describe the required tools and libraries in detail.

GitLab’s CI operates by running a series of steps and reporting success or failure. A typical CI job might do the following:

GitLab’s CI marks successful jobs with a green checkmark and failed jobs with a red “X”. Jobs provide a link to the corresponding console logfile which provides additional information.

Release packages are built on the following platforms:

Static code analysis and fuzz tests are run on the following platforms:

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

The Wireshark Wiki at https://wiki.wireshark.org/ provides a wide range of information related to Wireshark and packet capturing in general. You will find a lot of information not part of this developer’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 webbrowser.

The "Frequently Asked Questions" will list often asked questions and the corresponding answers.

Before sending any mail to the mailing lists below, be sure to read the FAQ, as 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.

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

An online version is available at the Wireshark website: 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.

If you don’t find the information you need inside this book, there are various other sources of information:

	Read the README
	README.developer is packed full with all kinds of details relevant to the developer of Wireshark source code. Its companion file README.dissector advises you around common pitfalls, shows you basic layout of dissector code, shows details of the APIs available to the dissector developer, etc.

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 issue isn’t discussed before you can post one yourself.

There are several mailing lists available on specific Wireshark topics:

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

The Wireshark community collects bug reports in an issues database at https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues. This database is filled with manually filed bug reports, usually after some discussion on wireshark-dev, and automatic bug reports from continuous integration jobs.

	Test with the latest version
	Before reporting any problems, please make sure you have installed the latest version of Wireshark. Reports on older maintenance releases are usually met with an upgrade request.

If you report problems, provide as much information as possible. In general, just think about what you would need to find that problem, if someone else sends you such a problem report. Also keep in mind that people compile/run Wireshark on a lot of different platforms.

When reporting problems with Wireshark, it is helpful if you supply the following information:

	Don’t send large files
	Do not send large files (>100KB) 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
	If you send captured data to the mailing lists, or add it to your bug report, be sure it doesn’t contain any sensitive or confidential information, such as passwords. Visibility of such files can be limited to certain groups in the GitLab Issues database by marking the issue confidential.

When reporting crashes with Wireshark, it is helpful if you supply the traceback information (besides the information mentioned in Section 1.7.8, “Reporting Problems”).

You can obtain this traceback information with the following commands:

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

Using GDB

Type the characters in the first line verbatim. Those are back-tics there. backtrace is a gdb command. You should enter it verbatim after the first line shown above, but it will not be echoed. The ^D (Control-D, that is, press the Control key and the D key together) will cause gdb to exit. This will leave you with a file called bt.txt in the current directory. Include the file with your bug report. If you do not have gdb available, you will have to check out your operating system’s debugger.

You should mail the traceback to wireshark-dev[AT]wireshark.org or attach it to your bug report.

You can download Windows debugging symbol files (.pdb) from the following locations:

Files are named "Wireshark-pdb-winbits-x.y.z.zip" to match their corresponding "Wireshark-winbits-x.y.z.exe" installer packages.

The following must be installed in order to build Wireshark:

Either make or Ninja can be used to build Wireshark; at least one of those must be installed.

To build the manual pages, Developer’s Guide and User’s Guide, Asciidoctor, Xsltproc, and DocBook must be installed.

Perl is required to generate some code and run some code analysis checks.

Some features of Wireshark require additional libraries to be installed. The processes for doing so on various UN*X families is shown here.

There are shell scripts in the tools directory to install the packages and libraries required to build Wireshark. Usage is available with the --help option. root permission is required to run the scripts. The available scripts and their options for a given family of UN*Xes are shown in the section for that family.

Alpine Linux

The setup script is tools/alpine-setup.sh; its options are:

Arch Linux and pacman-based systems

The setup script is tools/arch-setup.sh; its options are:

BSD systems such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD

The setup script is tools/bsd-setup.sh; its options are:

Debian, and Linux distributions based on Debian, such as Ubuntu

The setup script is tools/debian-setup.sh; its options are:

RPM-based Linux distributions such as Red Hat, Centos, Fedora, and openSUSE

The setup script is tools/rpm-setup.sh; its options are:

macOS

You must first install Xcode.

There are two scripts available for macOS which will install the packages and libraries required to build Wireshark and its documentation: tools/macos-setup-brew.sh, which will use the Homebrew package manager and tools/macos-setup.sh, which will build any required libraries and tools locally, except for Qt 6.

tools/macos-setup-brew.sh supports the following options:

tools/macos-setup.sh supports the following options:

We recommend tools/macos-setup-brew.sh if you’re using Homebrew and you don’t need to worry about backward compatibility with older macOS releases.

If you will be building Wireshark with Qt 6, which is the default for Wireshark 4.0 and later, you will also have to install Qt; the tools/macos-setup.sh script will not install Qt 6. To install Qt, go to the Download Qt for open source use page, select “macOS” if it’s not already selected, and then select “Qt online installer for macOS“. This will download a .dmg for the installer; launch the installer. It will require that you log into your Qt account; if you don’t have an account, select “Sign up“ to create one. The next page will require you to accept the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License); do so. Continue to the “Installation Folder“ page of the installer screen, and select the “Custom installation“ option. On the “Select Components“ screen of the installer, select, for the desired Qt version, the “macOS” component. For example, at the time of this writing the Qt 6.5.3 “macOS” component is used to build the official packages. The “Qt Debug Information Files” component contains dSYM files which can be used for debugging. You can deselect all of the other the components such as “Qt Charts” or “Android xxxx” as they aren’t required.

Qt 6 needs the "Qt 5 Compatibility Module" to be installed as well. Additionally, the module "Qt Multimedia" may be installed, to support advanced controls for playing back streams in the RTP Player dialog.

Before building:

On macOS, you will need to set the Qt installation directory in the environment:

WIRESHARK_QT6_PREFIX_PATH=~/Qt/6.5.3/macos
export WIRESHARK_QT6_PREFIX_PATH

If you want to append a custom string to the package version, run the command

WIRESHARK_VERSION_EXTRA=-YourExtraVersionInfo
export WIRESHARK_VERSION_EXTRA

The recommended (and fastest) way to build Wireshark is with CMake and Ninja. Building with make took nearly 2x time as Ninja in one experiment.

CMake builds are best done in a separate build directory, such as a build subdirectory of the top-level source directory. If that directory is a subdirectory of the top-level source directory, to generate the build files, change to the build directory and enter the following command:

cmake ..

to use make as the build tool or

cmake -G Ninja ..

to use Ninja as the build tool.

If you created the build directory in the same directory that contains the top-level Wireshark source directory, to generate the build files, change to the build directory and enter the following command:

cmake ../{source directory}

to use make as the build tool or

cmake -G Ninja ../{source directory}

to use Ninja as the build tool. {source directory} is the name of the top-level Wireshark source directory.

If you need to build with a non-standard configuration, you can run

cmake -LH ../{source directory}

to see what options you have.

You can then run Ninja or make to build Wireshark.

ninja
# or
make

Once you have build Wireshark with ninja or make above, you should be able to test it by entering run/wireshark.

Install Wireshark 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.

To build the Wireshark User’s Guide and the Wireshark Developer’s Guide, build the all_guides target, e.g. make all_guides or ninja all_guides. Detailed information to build these guides can be found in the file doc/README.documentation.adoc in the Wireshark sources.

You can create packages using the following build targets and commands:

Installable packages typically require building Wireshark first.

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.

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.

MSYS2 comes with different environments/subsystems and the first thing you have to decide is which one to use. The differences among the environments are mainly environment variables, default compilers/linkers, architecture, system libraries used etc. If you are unsure, go with UCRT64.

It is possible to compile Wireshark for Microsoft Windows using Linux and MinGW. This way developers can deploy Wireshark on Windows systems without requiring a Windows host machine. Building for Windows using a Linux host is also easier for devs already familiar with Linux, the build itself is faster and it uses a very mature C/C++ compiler (GCC) and debugger (GDB).

2.2.3.2. Using Arch Linux

Arch Linux has good support for MinGW using packages from the AUR. Note that the mingw-w64 AUR packages sometimes break. If that happens you may be required to fix it or skip the package until it is fixed by the maintainer, if it’s an optional dependency. You may also want to consider using an unofficial user repository (such as the ownstuff repository) to provide pre-compiled packages. This will greatly simplify the initial setup and subsequent upgrades.

	Caution
	AUR packages and unofficial user repositories are user-produced content. These packages are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. It is your decision whether to trust their maintainers and you take full responsibility for choosing to use them.

You will need to install an AUR helper. This guide assumes paru is being used.

1. Install required dependencies from official repositories:

   pacman -S mingw-w64 nsis lemon qt6-tools ccache

2. Install required dependencies from the AUR:

   paru -S mingw-w64-cmake
   paru -S mingw-w64-glib2
   paru -S mingw-w64-libgcrypt
   paru -S mingw-w64-c-ares
   paru -S mingw-w64-speexdsp
   paru -S mingw-w64-libpcap

3. Install Qt6:

   paru -S mingw-w64-qt6-base mingw-w64-qt6-5compat mingw-w64-qt6-multimedia

4. Install optional dependencies:

   paru -S mingw-w64-gnutls
   paru -S mingw-w64-lz4
   paru -S mingw-w64-snappy
   paru -S mingw-w64-opus
   paru -S mingw-w64-opencore-amr
   paru -S mingw-w64-libxml2
   paru -S mingw-w64-libnghttp2
   paru -S mingw-w64-libssh
   paru -S mingw-w64-minizip

   Search the AUR for other dependencies not listed above.

5. Build Wireshark using CMake + Ninja. From the directory containing the Wireshark source tree run:

   mkdir build && cd build
   x86_64-w64-mingw32-cmake -G Ninja -DENABLE_CCACHE=Yes -DFETCH_lua=Yes \
         -DMINGW_SYSROOT=/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32 ..
   ninja

   This will automatically download and build Lua as a static library.

   To reconfigure the CMake build you may to do it explicitly by running x86_64-w64-mingw32-cmake . in the build directory, instead of letting ninja do it for you automatically.

6. Build the NSIS installer

   ninja wireshark_nsis_prep
   ninja wireshark_nsis

If everything goes well the installer can be found in $CMAKE_BINARY_DIR/packaging/nsis.

The same notes as the build using Fedora apply.

Like most revision control systems, Git uses branching to manage different copies of the source code and allow parallel development. Wireshark uses the following branch naming conventions:

master.  Main feature development and odd-numbered development releases.

release-x.y, master-x.y.  Stable release maintenance. For example, release-3.4 is used to manage the 3.4.x official releases.

Tags for major releases and release candidates consist of a “v” followed by a version number such as “v3.2.1” or “v3.2.3rc0”. Major releases additionally have a tag prefixed with “wireshark-” followed by a version number, such as “wireshark-3.2.0”.

Tags created after August 1, 2024 are signed using SSH. This includes the tags for versions 4.4.0rc1, 4.4.0, 4.2.7, and 4.0.17. If you wish to verify these tags, you must have the following entry in ~/.ssh/allowed_signers:

[email protected] namespaces="git" ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIBHe1qOxwBietT54lZ3qawTc8B9unWP+T3JVR9l2rQaP

Tags were signed using GPG prior to August 2024.

This method is strongly recommended for day to day development.

You can use a Git client to download the source code from Wireshark’s code review system. Anyone can clone from the anonymous HTTP git URL:

https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark.git

If you have a GitLab account you can also clone using SSH:

[email protected]:wireshark/wireshark.git

If wish to make changes to Wireshark you must create a GitLab account, create a fork of the official Wireshark repository, update your fork, and create a merge request. See Section 3.10, “Contribute Your Changes” for details.

The following example shows how to get up and running on the command line. See Section 4.11, “Git client” for information on installing and configuring graphical Git clients.

This method is useful for one-off builds or if Git is inaccessible (e.g. because of a restrictive firewall).

Our GitLab CI configuration automatically generates development packages, including source packages. They can be found at https://www.wireshark.org/download/automated/src/. Packages are available for recent commits in the master branch and each release branch.

This method is recommended for building downstream release packages.

The official source releases can be found at https://www.wireshark.org/download.html. You should use these sources if you want to build Wireshark on your platform based on an official release with minimal or no changes, such as Linux distribution packages.

From time to time you will likely want to synchronize your master branch with the upstream repository. You can do so by running:

$ git pull --rebase upstream master

Follow the build procedure in Section 2.1, “UN*X” to build Wireshark.

Follow the build procedure in Section 2.2, “Windows” to build Wireshark.

After the build process has successfully finished, you should find a Wireshark.exe and some other files in the run\RelWithDebInfo directory.

CMake can compile Wireshark for several different build types:

The default is RelWithDebInfo, which provides a good compromise of some optimization (-O2) along with including debug symbols (-g) for release builds. For normal development coding you probably want to be using Debug build type or set -DENABLE_DEBUG=On, to enable full logging capabilities and debug code.

CMake will automatically add the -DNDEBUG option to certain build types. This macro is used to disable assertions but it can be overruled using ENABLE_ASSERT, which can be used to unconditionally enable assertions if defined.

To change the build type, set the CMake variable CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE, e.g.:

$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

or on Windows,

> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=Debug Wireshark.sln

After a successful build you can run Wireshark right from the run directory. There’s no need to install it first.

$ ./run/wireshark

There’s no need to run Wireshark as root user, but depending on your platform you might not be able to capture. Running Wireshark this way can be helpful since debugging output will be displayed in your terminal. You can also change Wireshark’s behavior by setting various environment variables. See the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES section of the Wireshark man page for more details.

On macOS, Wireshark is built as an application bundle (run/Wireshark.app) by default, and run/wireshark will be a wrapper script that runs Wireshark.app/Contents/MacOS/Wireshark. Along with running ./run/wireshark as shown above you can also run it on the command line with open run/Wireshark.app.

By default the CMake-generated Visual C++ project places all of the files necessary to run Wireshark in the subdirectory run\RelWithDebInfo. As with the Unix-like build described above, you can run Wireshark from the build directory without installing it first.

> .\run\RelWithDebInfo\Wireshark

Wireshark has a flexible logging system to assist in development and troubleshooting. Logging configuration takes into account what, when and where to output diagnostic messages.

The details to configure and use the logging system are explained in the following sections.

Sometimes it can be helpful to abort the program right after a log message of a certain level or a certain domain is output.

The following environment variables are used to configure a trap by the logging system:

The logging API can be found in wsutil/wslog.h.

To use the logging API for your code add the definition of the ID of your logging domain right after including config.h. For example:

/* My code doing something awesome */
#include "config.h"
#define WS_LOG_DOMAIN "MyCode"

#include <wireshark.h>

...

Populate your code with the applicable function calls to generate log messages when enabled. The following convenience macros are provided:

All these take printf() style parameters. There is also a WS_DEBUG_HERE macro that is always active and outputs to a special "echo" domain for temporary debug print outs. WS_DEBUG_HERE should be used for development purposes only and not appear in final delivery of the code.

You can debug using command-line debuggers such as gdb, dbx, or lldb. If you prefer a graphic debugger, you can use an IDE or debugging frontend such as Qt Creator, CLion, or Eclipse.

Additional traps can be set on Wireshark, see Section 3.8.2, “Traps Set By Logging”

3.8.4.1. Memory Safety and Leaks

Wireshark’s wmem memory management framework makes it easy to allocate memory in pools with a certain scope that is freed automatically at a certain point (such as the end of dissecting a packet or when closing a file), even if a dissector raises an exception after allocating the memory. Memory in a pool is also freed collectively, which can be considerably faster than calling free() individually on each individual allocation. Proper use of wmem makes a dissector faster and less prone to memory leaks with unexpected data, which happens frequently with capture files.

However, wmem’s block allocation can obscure issues that memory checkers might otherwise catch. Fortunately, the WIRESHARK_DEBUG_WMEM_OVERRIDE environment variable can be set at runtime to instruct wmem to use a specific memory allocator for all allocations, some of which are more compatible with memory checkers:

• simple - Uses malloc() only, no block allocation, compatible with Valgrind
• strict - Finds invalid memory via canaries and scrubbing freed memory
• block - Standard block allocator for file and epan scopes
• block_fast - Block allocator for short-lived scope, e.g. packet, (free() is a no-op)

The simple allocator produces the most accurate results with tools like Valgrind and can be enabled as follows:

$ export WIRESHARK_DEBUG_WMEM_OVERRIDE=simple

Wireshark uses GLib’s GSlice memory allocator, either indirectly via wmem or via various GLib API calls. GLib provides a G_SLICE environment variable that can be set to always-malloc (similar to simple) or debug-blocks (similar to strict). See https://developer-old.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-running.html for details. The C libraries on FreeBSD, Linux, and macOS also support memory allocation debugging via various environment variables. You can enable many of them by running source tools/debug-alloc.env in a POSIX shell.

If you’re encountering memory safety bugs, you might want to build with Address Sanitizer (ASAN) so that Wireshark will immediately alert you to any detected issues. It works with GCC or Clang, provided that the appropriate libraries are installed.

$ cmake .. -G Ninja -DENABLE_ASAN=1
$ source ../tools/debug-alloc.env
$ ./run/tshark ...

	Tip
	ASAN slows things down by a factor of 2 (or more), so having a different build directory for an ASAN build can be useful.

ASAN will catch more errors when run with either the simple or strict wmem allocator than with the defaults. (It is more compatible with the strict allocator and the analogous GSlice debug-blocks option than Valgrind is.)

For additional instrumentation, ASAN supports a number of options.

For further investigating memory leaks, the following can be useful:

# This slows things down a lot more but results in more precise backtraces,
# especially when calling third party libraries (such as the C++ standard
# library):
$ export ASAN_OPTIONS=fast_unwind_on_malloc=0
# This causes LeakSanitizer to print the addresses of leaked objects for
# inspection in a debugger:
$ export LSAN_OPTIONS=report_objects=1

LeakSanitizer and AddressSanitizer can detect issues in third-party libraries that you cannot do anything about. For example, internal Qt library calls to the fontconfig library can produce leaks. To ignore them, create a suppressions file with an appropriate entry, e.g. leak:libfontconfig.

If you are just interested in memory safety checking, but not memory leak debugging, disable the included LeakSanitizer with:

$ export ASAN_OPTIONS=detect_leaks=0

You can debug using the Visual Studio Debugger or WinDbg. See the section on using the Debugger Tools.

GitLab uses a forking workflow, which looks like this:

Figure 3.1. GitLab Workflow

The major steps of the diagram above are:

Let’s look at these steps in more detail.

First, you need to set up your environment. For the steps below we’ll pretend that your username is “henry.perry”.

Before you begin it’s a good idea to synchronize your local repository with the main repository. This is the Pull part of the workflow. Simply re-run the command in Section 3.5.1, “Update Using Git”. You should do this periodically in order to stay up to date and avoid merge conflicts later on.

Now you’re ready to create a merge request (the Push and Merge Request parts of the workflow above).

At this point various automated tests will be run and someone will review your change. If you need to make changes you can do so by force-pushing it to the same branch in your personal repository.

Some tips that will make the merging of your changes into Git much more likely (and you want exactly that, don’t you?):

Use the latest Git sources.  It’s a good idea to work with the same sources that are used by the other developers. This usually makes it much easier to apply your patch. For information about the different ways to get the sources, see Section 3.4, “Obtaining The Wireshark Sources”.

Update your sources just before making a patch.  For the same reasons as the previous point.

Inspect your patch carefully.  Run git diff or git show as appropriate and make sure you aren’t adding, removing, or omitting anything you shouldn’t.

Give your branch a brief but descriptive name.  Short, specific names such as snowcone-machine-protocol are preferred.

Don’t put unrelated things into one large change.  Merge requests should be limited in scope. For example, updates to the Snowcone Machine Protocol dissector and the Coloring Rules dialog box should be in separate merge requests.

In general, making it easier to understand and apply your patch by one of the maintainers will make it much more likely (and faster) that it will actually be applied.

Thank you in advance for your patience.  Wireshark is a volunteer effort. As a result, we can’t guarantee a quick turnaround time.

Preview the final product.  Wireshark’s GitLab CI jobs are disabled by default for forks, but if you need to test any CI jobs you can do so under the “Pipelines” section in your repository. For example, if your change might affect Debian (apt) packaging you can run the “build:debian-stable” job.

When running git commit, you will be prompted to describe your change. Here are some guidelines on how to make that message more useful to other people (and to scripts that may try to parse it):

Provide a brief description (under 60 characters or so) of the change in the first line.  If the change is specific to a single protocol, start this line with the abbreviated name of the protocol and a colon. If the change is not yet complete prefix the line with “WIP:” to inform this change not to be submitted yet. This be removed when the change is ready to be merged.

Insert a single blank line after the first line.  This is required by various formatting tools and helpful to humans.

Provide a detailed description of the change in the lines that follow.  Break paragraphs where needed. Limit each line to 80 characters.

You can also reference and close issues in a commit message by prefixing the issue number with a number sign. For example, “closes #5” will close issue number 5.

Putting all that together, we get the following example:

MIPv6: Fix dissection of Service Selection Identifier

APN field is not encoded as a dotted string so the first character is not a
length. Closes #10323.

To ensure Wireshark’s code quality and to reduce friction in the code review process, there are some things you should consider before submitting a patch:

Follow the Wireshark source code style guide.  Wireshark runs on many platforms, and can be compiled with a number of different compilers. It’s easy to write code that compiles on your machine, but doesn’t compile elsewhere. The guidelines at Section 6.2, “Coding Style” describe the techniques and APIs that you can use to write high-quality, portable, and maintainable code in our environment.

Submit dissectors as built-in whenever possible.  Developing a new dissector as a plugin can make compiling and testing quicker, but it’s usually best to convert it to built-in before submitting for review. This reduces the number of files that must be installed with Wireshark and ensures your dissector will be available on all platforms.

Dissectors vary, so this is not a hard-and-fast rule. Most dissectors are single C modules that can easily be put into “the big pile.” Some (most notably ASN.1 dissectors) are generated using templates and configuration files. Others are split across multiple source files and are often more suitable to be placed in a separate plugin directory.

Ensure that the Wireshark Git Pre-Commit Hook is in the repository.  In your local repository directory, there will be a .git/hooks/ directory, with sample git hooks for running automatic actions before and after git commands. You can also optionally install other hooks that you find useful.

In particular, the pre-commit hook will run every time you commit a change and can be used to automatically check for various errors in your code. The sample git pre-commit hook simply detects whitespace errors such as mixed tabs and spaces. To install it just remove the .sample suffix from the existing pre-commit.sample file.

Wireshark provides a custom pre-commit hook which does additional Wireshark-specific API and formatting checks, but it might return false positives. If you want to install it, copy the pre-commit file from the tools directory (cp ./tools/pre-commit .git/hooks/) and make sure it is executable or it will not be run.

If the pre-commit hook is preventing you from committing what you believe is a valid change, you can run git commit --no-verify to skip running the hooks. Warning: using --no-verify avoids the commit-msg hook, and thus if you have setup this hook it will not run.

Additionally, if your system supports symbolic links, as all UNIX-like platforms do, you can use them instead of copying files. Running ln -s ../../tools/pre-commit .git/hooks creates a symbolic link that will make the hook to be up-to-date with the current master.

Choose a compatible license.  Wireshark is released under the GPL version 2 or later, and it is strongly recommended that incoming code use that license. If that is not possible, it must use a compatible license. The following licenses are currently allowed:

Notable incompatible licenses include Apache 2.0, GPL 3.0, and LGPL 3.0.

Fuzz test your changes.  Fuzz testing is a very effective way of finding dissector related bugs. In our case fuzzing involves making random changes to capture files and feeding them to TShark in order to try to make it crash or hang. There are tools available to automatically do this on any number of input files. See https://wiki.wireshark.org/FuzzTesting for details.

When a bug is fixed in the master branch it’s sometimes desirable or necessary to backport the fix to a release branch. You can do this in Git by cherry-picking the change from one branch to another. Suppose you want to backport change 1ab2c3d4 from the master branch to master-3.2. You can do so as follows:

# Create a new topic branch for the backport.
$ git checkout -b backport-1ab2c3d4 upstream/master-3.2

# Cherry-pick the change. Include a "cherry picked from..." line.
$ git cherry-pick -x 1ab2c3d4

# If there are conflicts, fix them.

# Compile and test the change.
$ ninja
$ ...

# OPTIONAL: Add entries to doc/release-notes.adoc.
$EDITOR doc/release-notes.adoc

# If you made any changes, update your commit.
git commit --amend -a

# Push the change to your working repository.
git push downstream HEAD

You can also cherry-pick changes in the GitLab web UI.

The following guidelines should be followed by anyone creating and distributing third-party Wireshark packages or redistributing official Wireshark packages.

Spelling And Capitalization

Wireshark is spelled with a capital “W”, and with everything else lower case. “WireShark” in particular is incorrect.

Main URL

The official Wireshark project URL is https://www.wireshark.org/.

Download URLs

Official packages are distributed on the main web server (www.wireshark.org) and a number of download mirrors. The canonical locations for packages are in the all_versions subdirectories on each server.

For example, if your packaging system links to or downloads the source tarball and you want to download from 1.na.dl.wireshark.org, use

https://1.na.dl.wireshark.org/download/src/all-versions/wireshark-4.5.0.tar.zst

instead of

https://1.na.dl.wireshark.org/download/src/wireshark-4.5.0.tar.zst

Staying Current

Wireshark releases are announced on the wireshark-announce mailing list. A PAD file is also published at https://www.wireshark.org/wireshark-pad.xml which contains the current stable version and release date.

Artwork

Logo and icon artwork can be found in the image directory in the distribution. This is available online at

https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/tree/master/image

Licensing

Wireshark is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Make sure you and your package comply with this license.

Trademarks

Wireshark and the “fin” logo are registered trademarks of the Wireshark Foundation. Make sure you and your package comply with trademark law.

Privileges

All function calls that require elevated privileges are in dumpcap.

WIRESHARK CONTAINS OVER THREE MILLION LINES OF SOURCE CODE. DO NOT RUN THEM AS ROOT.

Warnings are displayed when Wireshark and TShark are run as root.

There are two configure-time options on non-Windows systems that affect the privileges a normal user needs to capture traffic and list interfaces:

These are necessary for non-root users to be able to capture on most systems, e.g. on Linux or FreeBSD if the user doesn’t have permissions to access /dev/bpf*. Setcap installation is preferred over setuid on Linux. If -DDUMPCAP_INSTALL_OPTION=capabilities is used it will override any setuid settings.

The -DENABLE_CAP option is only useful when dumpcap is installed setuid. If it is enabled dumpcap will try to drop any setuid privileges it may have while retaining the CAP_NET_ADMIN and CAP_NET_RAW capabilities. It is enabled by default, if the Linux capabilities library (on which it depends) is found.

Note that enabling setcap or setuid installation allows packet capture for ALL users on your system. If this is not desired, you can restrict dumpcap execution to a specific group or user. The following two examples show how to restrict access using setcap and setuid respectively:

# groupadd -g packetcapture
# chmod 750 /usr/bin/dumpcap
# chgrp packetcapture /usr/bin/dumpcap
# setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin+ep /usr/bin/dumpcap

# groupadd -g packetcapture
# chgrp packetcapture /usr/bin/dumpcap
# chmod 4750 /usr/bin/dumpcap

Customization

Custom version information can be added by running tools/make-version.py. If your package contains significant changes we recommend that you use this to differentiate it from official Wireshark releases.

tools/make-version.py --set-release --untagged-version-extra=-{vcsinfo}-FooCorp --tagged-version-extra=-FooCorp .

See tools/make-version.py for details.

The Git version corresponding to each release is in version.h. It’s defined as a string. If you need a numeric definition, let us know.

If you have a question not addressed here, please contact wireshark-dev[AT]wireshark.org.

The Debian Package is built using dpkg-buildpackage, based on information found in the source tree under packaging/debian. You must create a top-level symbolic link to packaging/debian before building. See https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/build.en.html for a more in-depth discussion of the build process.

In the wireshark directory, type:

ln -snf packaging/debian
export DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="nocheck"
dpkg-buildpackage -b -us -uc -jauto

to build the Debian Package.

You can build an RPM package using the wireshark_rpm target. If you are building from a git checkout, the package version is derived from the current git HEAD. If you are building from source extracted from a tarball created with git archive (such as those downloaded from http://www.wireshark.org/download.html), you must place the original tarball into your build directory.

The package is built using rpmbuild, which comes as standard on many flavours of Linux, including Red Hat, Fedora, and openSUSE. The process creates a clean build environment in ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/packaging/rpm/BUILD each time the RPM is built. The settings that control the build are in ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/packaging/rpm/wireshark.spec.in. The generated SPEC file contains CMake flags and other settings for the RPM build environment. Many of these come from the parent CMake environment. Notable ones are:

In your build directory, type:

ninja wireshark_rpm
# ...or, if you're using GNU make...
make wireshark_rpm

to build the binary and source RPMs. When it is finished there will be a message stating where the built RPM can be found.

	This might take a while
	This creates a tarball, extracts it, compiles Wireshark, and constructs a package. This can take quite a long time. You can speed up the process by using Ninja. If you’re using GNU make you can add the following to your ~/.rpmmacros file to enable parallel builds: %_smp_mflags -j %(grep -c processor /proc/cpuinfo)

Building the RPM package requires quite a few packages and libraries including GLib, gcc, flex, Asciidoctor, and Qt development tools such as uic and moc. The required Qt packages can usually be obtained by installing the qt5-devel package. For a complete list of build requirements, look for the “BuildRequires” lines in packaging/rpm/wireshark.spec.in.

The macOS Package is built using macOS packaging tools, based on information found in the source tree under packaging/macosx. It requires Asciidoctor and dmgbuild.

In your build directory, type:

ninja wireshark_dmg stratoshark_dmg # (Modify as needed)
# ...or, if you're using GNU make...
make wireshark_dmg stratoshark_dmg # (Modify as needed)

to build the macOS Packages.

The Nullsoft Install System is a free installer generator for Windows systems. Instructions on installing it can be found in Section 4.16, “Windows: NSIS (Optional)”. NSIS is script based. You can find the main Wireshark installer generation script at packaging/nsis/wireshark.nsi.

When building with CMake you must first build the wireshark_nsis_prep target, followed by the wireshark_nsis target, e.g.

> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo wireshark_nsis_prep.vcxproj
> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo wireshark_nsis.vcxproj

Splitting the packaging projects in this way allows for code signing.

	This might take a while
	Please be patient while the package is compressed. It might take some time, even on fast machines.

If everything went well, you will now find something like: wireshark-setup-4.5.0.exe in the packaging/nsis directory in your build directory.

PortableApps.com is an environment that lets users run popular applications from portable media such as flash drives and cloud drive services.

When building with CMake you must first build the wireshark_nsis_prep target (which takes care of general packaging dependencies), followed by the wireshark_portableapps target, e.g.

> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo wireshark_nsis_prep.vcxproj
> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo wireshark_portableapps.vcxproj

	This might take a while
	Please be patient while the package is compressed. It might take some time, even on fast machines.

If everything went well, you will now find something like: WiresharkPortable64_4.5.0.paf.exe in the packaging/portableapps directory.

MimeType: application/vnd.wireshark.displayfilter

Display filters are being dragged and dropped by utilizing this mime type.

{
        "filter": "udp.port == 8080",
        "field": "udp.port",
        "description": "UDP Port"
}

MimeType: application/vnd.wireshark.coloringrules

Coloring Rules are being used for dragging and dropping color rules inside the coloring rules dialog.

{
        "coloringrules" :
        [
                {
                        "disabled": false,
                        "name": "UDP Ports for 8080",
                        "filter": "udp.port == 8080",
                        "foreground": "[0x0000, 0x0000, 0x0000]",
                        "background": "[0xFFFF, 0xFFFF, 0xFFFF]"
                }
        ]
}

MimeType: application/vnd.wireshark.filterlist

Internal Use only - used on the filter list for moving entries within the list

MimeType: application/vnd.wireshark.columnlist

Internal Use only - used on the column list for moving entries within the list

The GCC C compiler is available for most UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.

If GCC isn’t already installed or available as a package for your platform, you can get it at: https://gcc.gnu.org/.

After correct installation, typing at the bash command line prompt:

$ gcc --version

should result in something like

gcc (Ubuntu 4.9.1-16ubuntu6) 4.9.1
Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Your version string may vary, of course.

GDB is the debugger for the GCC compiler. It is available for many (if not all) UNIX-like platforms.

If you don’t like debugging using the command line, many GUI frontends for it available, including Qt Creator, CLion, and Eclipse.

If gdb isn’t already installed or available as a package for your platform, you can get it at: https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/gdb.html.

After correct installation:

$ gdb --version

should result in something like:

GNU gdb (GDB) 8.3
Copyright (C) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Your version string may vary, of course.

	GNU make isn’t supported either for Windows
	GNU Make is available for most of the UNIX-like platforms.

If GNU Make isn’t already installed or available as a package for your platform, you can get it at: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/.

After correct installation:

$ make --version

should result in something like:

GNU Make 4.0
Built for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Copyright (C) 1988-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Licence GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Your version string may vary, of course.

Ninja is an alternative to make, and is available for many of the UNIX-like platforms. It runs builds faster than make does.

It is designed to have its build files generated by tools such as CMake; to generate build files for Ninja, run CMake with the -G Ninja flag.

If Ninja isn’t already installed, see the list of suggestions for Ninja packages at: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/wiki/Pre-built-Ninja-packages.

If Ninja isn’t already installed and isn’t available as a package for your platform, you can get it from: https://ninja-build.org. You can download the source code or binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows (we have not tested Ninja on Windows).

Official releases are or were built with the following Visual C++ versions:

Using the release compilers is recommended for Wireshark development work.

“Community” editions of Visual Studio such as “Visual Studio Community 2022” can be used to compile Wireshark but any PortableApps packages you create with them might require the installation of a separate Visual C++ Redistributable package on any machine on which the PortableApps package is to be used. See Section 4.5.5, “Visual C++ Runtime “Redistributable” Files” below for more details.

However, you might already have a different Microsoft C++ compiler installed. It should be possible to use any of the following with the considerations listed. You will need to sign up for a Visual Studio Dev Essentials account if you don’t have a Visual Studio (MSDN) subscription. The older versions can be downloaded from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/older-downloads/.

CMake Generator: Visual Studio 17

You can use Chocolatey to install Visual Studio, e.g:

PS:\> choco install visualstudiocommunity2022 visualstudio2022-workload-nativedesktop

If you wish to build Arm64 executables you must install the following components:

The following table gives an overview of the possible Microsoft toolchain variants and their specific C compiler versions ordered by release date.

A description of _MSC_VER and _MSC_FULL_VER, and their relation to Visual Studio and compiler versions, can be found at Microsoft-specific predefined macros.

Information on the VC++ version can be found in the file wsutil/version_info.c.

After correct installation of the toolchain, typing at the Visual Studio Command line prompt (cmd.exe):

> cl

should result in something like:

Microsoft (R) C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 19.23.28106.4 for x64
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

usage: cl [ option... ] filename... [ /link linkoption... ]

However, the version string may vary.

Documentation on recent versions of the compiler can be found at Microsoft Docs

After correct installation, typing at the Visual Studio Command line prompt (cmd.exe):

> link

should result in something like:

Microsoft (R) Incremental Linker Version 14.23.28106.4
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

 usage: LINK [options] [files] [@commandfile]
 ...

However, the version string may vary.

Documentation on recent versions of the linker can be found at Microsoft Docs

Please note: The following is not legal advice. Ask your preferred lawyer instead. It’s the authors view and this view might be wrong.

Wireshark and its libraries depend on POSIX functions such as fopen() and malloc(). On Windows, these functions are provided by the Microsoft Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT). There are many different versions of the CRT and Visual C++ 2015 and later use the Universal CRT (UCRT).

The Universal CRT comes standard with Windows 10 and is installed as part of Windows Update on earlier versions of Windows. The Wireshark .exe installers include redistributables (vc_redist.x64.exe or vc_redist.arm64.exe) which ensure that the Universal CRT is installed and up to date.

	Make sure you’re allowed to distribute this file
	The files to redistribute must be mentioned in the redist.txt file of the compiler package. Otherwise it can’t be legally redistributed by third parties like us.

The following Microsoft Docs link is recommended for the interested reader:

Redistributing Visual C++ Files

In all cases where vc_redist.x64.exe or vc_redist.arm64.exe is downloaded it should be downloaded to the directory into which the support libraries for Wireshark have been downloaded and installed. This directory is specified by the WIRESHARK_BASE_DIR or WIRESHARK_LIB_DIR environment variables. It need not, and should not, be run after being downloaded.

The Windows Platform SDK (PSDK) or Windows SDK is a free (as in beer) download and contains platform specific headers and libraries (e.g. windows.h, WSock32.lib, etc.). As new Windows features evolve in time, updated SDKs become available that include new and updated APIs.

When you purchase a commercial Visual Studio or use the Community Edition, it will include an SDK.

Asciidoctor comes in several flavors: a Ruby gem (Asciidoctor), a Java bundle (AsciidoctorJ), and transpiled JavaScript (Asciidoctor.js). The Ruby and Java flavors can be used to build Wireshark’s documentation, but the JavaScript flavor doesn’t support all of the features that we require.

The guides and release notes were originally written in DocBook (hence the directory name). They were later converted to AsciiDoc and then migrated to Asciidoctor. The man pages were originally in Perl’s POD (Plain Old Documentation) format and were later converted to Asciidoctor. We use Asciidoctor’s modern (>= 1.5.0) syntax.

PDF output requires Asciidoctor’s PDF backend. It is included with AsciidoctorJ but not with Asciidoctor.

Converting from DocBook to HTML requires the DocBook DTD (http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ToolsSetup.html) and DocBook stylesheets (http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/InstallStylesheets.html). These are available via installable packages on most Linux distributions, Chocolatey, and Homebrew.

xsltproc converts DocBook XML to various formats based on XSL stylesheets. It either ships as part of the operating system or is available via an installable package on most Linux distributions, Chocolatey, and Homebrew.

You can use the integrated debugger of Visual Studio if your toolchain includes it. Open the solution in your build directory and build and debug as normal with a Visual Studio solution.

To set the correct paths for Visual Studio when running Wireshark under the debugger, add the build output directory to the path before opening Visual Studio from the same command prompt, e.g.

C:\Development\wsbuild64>set PATH="%PATH%;C:\Development\wsbuild64\run\RelwithDebInfo"
C:\Development\wsbuild64>wireshark.sln

for PowerShell use

PS C:\Development\wsbuild64>$env:PATH += ";$(Convert-Path run\RelWithDebInfo)"
PS C:\Development\wsbuild64>wireshark.sln

When Visual Studio has finished loading the solution, set the executable to be run in the debugger, e.g. Executables\Wireshark, by right clicking it in the Solution Explorer window and selecting "Set as StartUp Project". Also set the Solution Configuration (usually RelWithDebInfo) from the droplist on the toolbar.

	Note
	Currently Visual Studio regards a command line build as incomplete, so will report that some items need to be built when starting the debugger. These can either be rebuilt or ignored as you wish.

The normal build is an optimised release version so debugging can be a bit difficult as variables are optimised out into registers and the execution order of statements can jump around.

If you require a non-optimised version, then build using a debug configuration.

You can also use the Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows toolkit, which is a standalone GUI debugger. Although it’s not that comfortable compared to debugging with the Visual Studio integrated debugger it can be helpful if you have to debug on a machine where an integrated debugger is not available.

You can get it free of charge from Microsoft in several ways, see the Debugging tools for Windows page.

You can also use Chocolatey to install WinDbg:

PS:\> choco install windbg

To debug Wireshark using WinDbg, open the built copy of Wireshark using the File → Open Executable…​ menu, i.e. C:\Development\wsbuild64\run\RelWithDebInfo\Wireshark.exe. To set a breakpoint open the required source file using the File → Open Source File…​ menu and then click on the required line and press F9. To run the program, press F5.

If you require a non-optimised version, then build using a debug configuration, e.g. msbuild /m /p:Configuration=Debug Wireshark.sln. The build products will be found in C:\Development\wsbuild64\run\Debug\.

The actual capture is run after a setup process that can be done manually by the user or automatically by the GUI. All the steps performed are done for every extcap.

Let’s go through those steps.

$ extcapbin --extcap-interfaces

$ extcap_example.py --extcap-interfaces --extcap-version=4.0
extcap {version=1.0}{help=Some help url}
interface {value=example1}{display=Example interface 1 for extcap}
interface {value=example2}{display=Example interface 2 for extcap}

$ extcap_example.py --extcap-dlts --extcap-interface <iface>

$ extcap_example.py --extcap-interface IFACE --extcap-dlts
dlt {number=147}{name=USER1}{display=Demo Implementation for Extcap}

$ extcap_example.py --extcap-interface <iface> --extcap-config

$ extcap_example.py --extcap-interface <iface> --extcap-config
arg {number=0}{call=--delay}{display=Time delay}{tooltip=Time delay between packages}{type=integer}{range=1,15}{required=true}
arg {number=1}{call=--message}{display=Message}{tooltip=Package message content}{placeholder=Please enter a message here ...}{type=string}
arg {number=2}{call=--verify}{display=Verify}{tooltip=Verify package content}{type=boolflag}
arg {number=3}{call=--remote}{display=Remote Channel}{tooltip=Remote Channel Selector}{type=selector}
arg {number=4}{call=--server}{display=IP address for log server}{type=string}{validation=\\b(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\b}
value {arg=3}{value=if1}{display=Remote1}{default=true}
value {arg=3}{value=if2}{display=Remote2}{default=false}

$ extcap_example.py --extcap-interface <iface> [params] --capture [--extcap-capture-filter <cfilter>]
  --fifo FIFO

@echo off
C:\Windows\py.exe C:\Path\to\my\extcap.py %*

The extcap interface provides the possibility for generating a GUI dialog to set and adapt settings for the extcap binary.

All options must provide a number, by which they are identified. No number may be provided twice. All options must present the elements call and display, with call specifying the argument’s name on the command line and display specifying the name in the GUI.

Additionally tooltip and placeholder may be provided, which will give the user information about what to enter into this field.

These options do have types, for which the following types are being supported:

arg {number=0}{call=--delay}{display=Time delay}{tooltip=Time delay between packages}{type=integer}{range=1,15}{default=0}

arg {number=1}{call=--server}{display=IP Address}{tooltip=IP Address for log server}{type=string}{validation=\\b(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\b}

arg {number=0}{call=--password}{display=The user password}{tooltip=The password for the connection}{type=password}

arg {number=2}{call=--verify}{display=Verify}{tooltip=Verify package content}{type=boolflag}

arg {number=3}{call=--logfile}{display=Logfile}{tooltip=A file for log messages}{type=fileselect}{mustexist=false}

arg {number=3}{call=--remote}{display=Remote Channel}{tooltip=Remote Channel Selector}{type=selector}
value {arg=3}{value=if1}{display=Remote1}{default=true}
value {arg=3}{value=if2}{display=Remote2}{default=false}

arg {number=3}{call=--remote}{display=Remote Channel}{tooltip=Remote Channel Selector}{type=selector}{reload=true}{placeholder=Load interfaces...}

An extcap utility can provide configuration for controls to use in an interface toolbar. These controls are bidirectional and can be used to control the extcap utility while capturing.

This is useful in scenarios where configuration can be done based on findings in the capture process, setting temporary values or give other inputs without restarting the current capture.

Example of interface definition with toolbar controls. 

$ extcap_example.py --extcap-interfaces
extcap {version=1.0}{display=Example extcap interface}
interface {value=example1}{display=Example interface 1 for extcap}
interface {value=example2}{display=Example interface 2 for extcap}
control {number=0}{type=string}{display=Message}{tooltip=Package message content. Must start with a capital letter.}{validation=[A-Z]+}{required=true}
control {number=1}{type=selector}{display=Time delay}{tooltip=Time delay between packages}
control {number=2}{type=boolean}{display=Verify}{default=true}{tooltip=Verify package content}
control {number=3}{type=button}{display=Turn on}{tooltip=Turn on or off}
control {number=4}{type=button}{role=logger}{display=Log}{tooltip=Show capture log}
value {control=1}{value=1}{display=1 sec}
value {control=1}{value=2}{display=2 sec}{default=true}

All controls will be presented as GUI elements in a toolbar specific to the extcap utility. The extcap must not rely on using those controls (they are optional) because of other capturing tools not using GUI (e.g. tshark, tfshark).

The first decision you need to make is if this dissector will be a built-in dissector and included in the main program, or a plugin.

Plugins are easier to write initially, so let’s start with that. With a little care, the plugin can be converted into a built-in dissector.

Dissector Initialisation. 

#include "config.h"
#include <epan/packet.h>

#define FOO_PORT 1234

static int proto_foo;

void
proto_register_foo(void)
{
    proto_foo = proto_register_protocol (
        "FOO Protocol", /* name        */
        "FOO",          /* short name  */
        "foo"           /* filter_name */
        );
}

Let’s go through this a bit at a time. First we have some boilerplate include files. These will be pretty constant to start with.

Then a #define for the UDP port that carries foo traffic.

Next we have proto_foo, an int that stores our protocol handle and is initialised to -1. This handle will be set when the dissector is registered within the main program. It’s good practice to make all variables and functions that aren’t exported static to minimize name space pollution. This normally isn’t a problem unless your dissector gets so big that it spans multiple files.

Now that we have the basics in place to interact with the main program, we’ll start with two protocol dissector setup functions: proto_register_XXX and proto_reg_handoff_XXX.

Each protocol must have a register function with the form "proto_register_XXX". This function is used to register the protocol in Wireshark. The code to call the register routines is generated automatically and is called when Wireshark starts. In this example, the function is named proto_register_foo.

proto_register_foo calls proto_register_protocol(), which takes a name, short name, and filter_name. The name and short name are used in the "Preferences" and "Enabled protocols" dialogs and the documentation’s generated field name list. The filter_name is used as the display filter name. proto_register_protocol() returns a protocol handle, which can be used to refer to the protocol and obtain a handle to the protocol’s dissector.

Next we need a handoff routine.

Dissector Handoff. 

void
proto_reg_handoff_foo(void)
{
    static dissector_handle_t foo_handle;

    foo_handle = create_dissector_handle(dissect_foo, proto_foo);
    dissector_add_uint("udp.port", FOO_PORT, foo_handle);
}

A handoff routine associates a protocol handler with the protocol’s traffic. It consists of two major steps: The first step is to create a dissector handle, which is a handle associated with the protocol and the function called to do the actual dissecting. The second step is to register the dissector handle so that traffic associated with the protocol calls the dissector.

In this example, proto_reg_handoff_foo() calls create_dissector_handle() to obtain a dissector handle for the foo protocol. It then uses dissector_add_uint() to associate traffic on UDP port FOO_PORT (1234) with the foo protocol, so that Wireshark will call dissect_foo() when it receives UDP traffic on port 1234.

Wireshark’s dissector convention is to put proto_register_foo() and proto_reg_handoff_foo() as the last two functions in the dissector source.

The next step is to write the dissecting function, dissect_foo(). We’ll start with a basic placeholder.

Dissection. 

static int
dissect_foo(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo, proto_tree *tree _U_, void *data _U_)
{
    col_set_str(pinfo->cinfo, COL_PROTOCOL, "FOO");
    /* Clear the info column */
    col_clear(pinfo->cinfo,COL_INFO);

    return tvb_captured_length(tvb);
}

dissect_foo() is called to dissect the packets presented to it. The packet data is held in a special buffer referenced here as tvb. The packet_info structure contains general data about the protocol and we can update information here. The tree parameter is where the detail dissection takes place. Note that the _U_ following tree and data signals to the compiler that the parameters are unused, so that the compiler does not print a warning.

For now we’ll do the minimum we can get away with. col_set_str() is used to set Wireshark’s Protocol column to "FOO" so everyone can see it’s being recognised. The only other thing we do is to clear out any data in the INFO column if it’s being displayed.

At this point we have a basic dissector ready to compile and install. The dissector doesn’t do anything other than identify the protocol and label it. Here is the dissector’s complete code:

Complete packet-foo.c:. 

#include "config.h"
#include <epan/packet.h>

#define FOO_PORT 1234

static int proto_foo;

static int
dissect_foo(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo, proto_tree *tree _U_, void *data _U_)
{
    col_set_str(pinfo->cinfo, COL_PROTOCOL, "FOO");
    /* Clear the info column */
    col_clear(pinfo->cinfo,COL_INFO);

    return tvb_captured_length(tvb);
}

void
proto_register_foo(void)
{
    proto_foo = proto_register_protocol (
        "FOO Protocol", /* name        */
        "FOO",          /* short_name  */
        "foo"           /* filter_name */
        );
}

void
proto_reg_handoff_foo(void)
{
    static dissector_handle_t foo_handle;

    foo_handle = create_dissector_handle(dissect_foo, proto_foo);
    dissector_add_uint("udp.port", FOO_PORT, foo_handle);
}

To compile this dissector and create a plugin a few support files are required, besides the dissector source in packet-foo.c:

Samples of these files are available in the gryphon plugin directory (plugins/epan/gryphon). If you copy the files from the gryphon plugin, CMakeLists.txt will need to be updated with the correct plugin name, version info, and the relevant files to compile.

In the main top-level source directory, copy CMakeListsCustom.txt.example to CMakeListsCustom.txt and add the path of your plugin to the list in CUSTOM_PLUGIN_SRC_DIR.

Compile the dissector to a DLL or shared library and either run Wireshark from the build directory as detailed in Section 3.7, “Run Your Version Of Wireshark” or copy the plugin binary into the plugin directory of your Wireshark installation and run that.

Now that we have our basic dissector up and running, let’s do something with it. The simplest thing to start with is labeling the payload. We can label the payload by building a subtree to decode our results into. This subtree will hold all the protocol’s details and helps keep things looking nice in the detailed display.

We add the new subtree with proto_tree_add_item(), as is depicted below:

Plugin Packet Dissection. 

static int
dissect_foo(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo, proto_tree *tree, void *data _U_)
{
    col_set_str(pinfo->cinfo, COL_PROTOCOL, "FOO");
    /* Clear out stuff in the info column */
    col_clear(pinfo->cinfo,COL_INFO);

    proto_item *ti = proto_tree_add_item(tree, proto_foo, tvb, 0, -1, ENC_NA);

    return tvb_captured_length(tvb);
}

As the FOO protocol does not encapsulate another protocol, we consume all of the tvb’s data, from 0 to the end (-1).

The final parameter specifies the "encoding" and is set to ENC_NA ("not applicable"), as the protocol doesn’t specifically use big endian (ENC_BIG_ENDIAN) or little endian (ENC_LITTLE_ENDIAN).

After adding the call to proto_tree_add_item() , there should be a label FOO in the protocol’s detailed display. Selecting this label will highlight the remaining contents of the packet.

Now let’s go to the next step and add some protocol dissection. To do this we’ll need to construct tables to define which fields will be present in the packet and to store the opened/closed state of the subtree. We’ll add these statically allocated arrays to the beginning of the file and name them hf_register_info ('hf' is short for 'header field') and ett. The arrays wil then registered after the call to proto_register_protocol() by calling proto_register_field_array() and proto_register_subtree_array():

Registering data structures. 

static int hf_foo_pdu_type;
static int ett_foo;

/* ... */

void
proto_register_foo(void)
{
    static hf_register_info hf[] = {
        { &hf_foo_pdu_type,
            { "FOO PDU Type", "foo.type",
            FT_UINT8, BASE_DEC,
            NULL, 0x0,
            NULL, HFILL }
        }
    };

    /* Setup protocol subtree array */
    static int *ett[] = {
        &ett_foo
    };

    proto_foo = proto_register_protocol (
        "FOO Protocol", /* name       */
        "FOO",          /* short_name */
        "foo"           /* filter_name*/
        );

    proto_register_field_array(proto_foo, hf, array_length(hf));
    proto_register_subtree_array(ett, array_length(ett));
}

As you can see, a field foo.type was defined inside the array of header fields.

Now we can dissect the FOO PDU Type (referenced as foo.type) field in dissect_foo() by adding the FOO Protocol’s subtree with proto_item_add_subtree() and then calling proto_tree_add_item() to add the field:

Dissector starting to dissect the packets. 

    proto_item *ti = proto_tree_add_item(tree, proto_foo, tvb, 0, -1, ENC_NA);
    proto_tree *foo_tree = proto_item_add_subtree(ti, ett_foo);
    proto_tree_add_item(foo_tree, hf_foo_pdu_type, tvb, 0, 1, ENC_BIG_ENDIAN);

As mentioned earlier, the foo protocol begins with an 8-bit packet type which can have three possible values: 1 - initialisation, 2 - terminate, 3 - data. Here’s how we can add the packet details:

The proto_item_add_subtree() call has added a child node to the protocol tree which is where we will do our detail dissection. The expansion of this node is controlled by the ett_foo variable. This remembers if the node should be expanded or not as you move between packets. All subsequent dissection will be added to this tree, as you can see from the next call. A call to proto_tree_add_item() in the foo_tree, this time using the hf_foo_pdu_type to control the formatting of the item. The pdu type is one byte of data, starting at 0. We assume it is in network order (also called big endian), so that is why we use ENC_BIG_ENDIAN. For a 1-byte quantity, there is no order issue, but it is good practice to make this the same as any multibyte fields that may be present, and as we will see in the next section, this particular protocol uses network order.

If we look in detail at the hf_foo_pdu_type declaration in the static array we can see the details of the definition.

static hf_register_info hf[] = {
    { &hf_foo_pdu_type,
        { "FOO PDU Type", "foo.type",
        FT_UINT8, BASE_DEC,
        NULL, 0x0,
        NULL, HFILL }
    }
};

We’ll ignore the rest of the structure for now.

If you install this plugin and try it out, you’ll see something that begins to look useful.

Now let’s finish off dissecting the simple protocol. We need to add a few more variables to the hfarray, and a couple more procedure calls.

Wrapping up the packet dissection. 

...
static int hf_foo_flags;
static int hf_foo_sequenceno;
static int hf_foo_initialip;
...

static int
dissect_foo(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo, proto_tree *tree, void *data _U_)
{
    int offset = 0;

    ...
    proto_item *ti = proto_tree_add_item(tree, proto_foo, tvb, 0, -1, ENC_NA);
    proto_tree *foo_tree = proto_item_add_subtree(ti, ett_foo);
    proto_tree_add_item(foo_tree, hf_foo_pdu_type, tvb, offset, 1, ENC_BIG_ENDIAN);
    offset += 1;
    proto_tree_add_item(foo_tree, hf_foo_flags, tvb, offset, 1, ENC_BIG_ENDIAN);
    offset += 1;
    proto_tree_add_item(foo_tree, hf_foo_sequenceno, tvb, offset, 2, ENC_BIG_ENDIAN);
    offset += 2;
    proto_tree_add_item(foo_tree, hf_foo_initialip, tvb, offset, 4, ENC_BIG_ENDIAN);
    offset += 4;
    ...

    return tvb_captured_length(tvb);
}

void
proto_register_foo(void) {
    ...
        ...
        { &hf_foo_flags,
            { "FOO PDU Flags", "foo.flags",
            FT_UINT8, BASE_HEX,
            NULL, 0x0,
            NULL, HFILL }
        },
        { &hf_foo_sequenceno,
            { "FOO PDU Sequence Number", "foo.seqn",
            FT_UINT16, BASE_DEC,
            NULL, 0x0,
            NULL, HFILL }
        },
        { &hf_foo_initialip,
            { "FOO PDU Initial IP", "foo.initialip",
            FT_IPv4, BASE_NONE,
            NULL, 0x0,
            NULL, HFILL }
        },
        ...
    ...
}
...

This dissects all the bits of this simple hypothetical protocol. We’ve introduced a new variable offsetinto the mix to help keep track of where we are in the packet dissection. With these extra bits in place, the whole protocol is now dissected.

We can certainly improve the display of the protocol with a bit of extra data. The first step is to add some text labels. Let’s start by labeling the packet types. There is some useful support for this sort of thing by adding a couple of extra things. First we add a simple table of type to name.

Naming the packet types. 

static const value_string packettypenames[] = {
    { 1, "Initialise" },
    { 2, "Terminate" },
    { 3, "Data" },
    { 0, NULL }
};

This is a handy data structure that can be used to look up a name for a value. There are routines to directly access this lookup table, but we don’t need to do that, as the support code already has that added in. We just have to give these details to the appropriate part of the data, using the VALS macro.

Adding Names to the protocol. 

   { &hf_foo_pdu_type,
        { "FOO PDU Type", "foo.type",
        FT_UINT8, BASE_DEC,
        VALS(packettypenames), 0x0,
        NULL, HFILL }
    }

This helps in deciphering the packets, and we can do a similar thing for the flags structure. For this we need to add some more data to the table though.

Adding Flags to the protocol. 

#define FOO_START_FLAG      0x01
#define FOO_END_FLAG        0x02
#define FOO_PRIORITY_FLAG   0x04

static int hf_foo_startflag;
static int hf_foo_endflag;
static int hf_foo_priorityflag;

static int
dissect_foo(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo, proto_tree *tree, void *data _U_)
{
    ...
        ...
        static int* const bits[] = {
            &hf_foo_startflag,
            &hf_foo_endflag,
            &hf_foo_priorityflag,
            NULL
        };

        proto_tree_add_bitmask(foo_tree, tvb, offset, hf_foo_flags, ett_foo, bits, ENC_BIG_ENDIAN);
        offset += 1;
        ...
    ...
    return tvb_captured_length(tvb);
}

void
proto_register_foo(void) {
    ...
        ...
        { &hf_foo_startflag,
            { "FOO PDU Start Flags", "foo.flags.start",
            FT_BOOLEAN, 8,
            NULL, FOO_START_FLAG,
            NULL, HFILL }
        },
        { &hf_foo_endflag,
            { "FOO PDU End Flags", "foo.flags.end",
            FT_BOOLEAN, 8,
            NULL, FOO_END_FLAG,
            NULL, HFILL }
        },
        { &hf_foo_priorityflag,
            { "FOO PDU Priority Flags", "foo.flags.priority",
            FT_BOOLEAN, 8,
            NULL, FOO_PRIORITY_FLAG,
            NULL, HFILL }
        },
        ...
    ...
}
...

Some things to note here. For the flags, as each bit is a different flag, we use the type FT_BOOLEAN, as the flag is either on or off. Second, we include the flag mask in the 7th field of the data, which allows the system to mask the relevant bit. We’ve also changed the 5th field to 8, to indicate that we are looking at an 8 bit quantity when the flags are extracted. Then finally we add the extra constructs to the dissection routine.

This is starting to look fairly full featured now, but there are a couple of other things we can do to make things look even more pretty. At the moment our dissection shows the packets as "Foo Protocol" which whilst correct is a little uninformative. We can enhance this by adding a little more detail. First, let’s get hold of the actual value of the protocol type. We can use the handy function tvb_get_uint8() to do this. With this value in hand, there are a couple of things we can do. First we can set the INFO column of the non-detailed view to show what sort of PDU it is - which is extremely helpful when looking at protocol traces. Second, we can also display this information in the dissection window.

Enhancing the display. 

static int
dissect_foo(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo, proto_tree *tree, void *data _U_)
{
    int offset = 0;
    uint8_t packet_type = tvb_get_uint8(tvb, 0);

    col_set_str(pinfo->cinfo, COL_PROTOCOL, "FOO");
    /* Clear out stuff in the info column */
    col_clear(pinfo->cinfo,COL_INFO);
    col_add_fstr(pinfo->cinfo, COL_INFO, "Type %s",
             val_to_str(packet_type, packettypenames, "Unknown (0x%02x)"));

    proto_item *ti = proto_tree_add_item(tree, proto_foo, tvb, 0, -1, ENC_NA);
    proto_item_append_text(ti, ", Type %s",
        val_to_str(packet_type, packettypenames, "Unknown (0x%02x)"));
    proto_tree *foo_tree = proto_item_add_subtree(ti, ett_foo);
    proto_tree_add_item(foo_tree, hf_foo_pdu_type, tvb, offset, 1, ENC_BIG_ENDIAN);
    offset += 1;

    return tvb_captured_length(tvb);
}

So here, after grabbing the value of the first 8 bits, we use it with one of the built-in utility routines val_to_str(), to lookup the value. If the value isn’t found we provide a fallback which just prints the value in hex. We use this twice, once in the INFO field of the columns — if it’s displayed, and similarly we append this data to the base of our dissecting tree.

As an example, let’s examine a protocol that is layered on top of UDP that splits up its own data stream. If a packet is bigger than some given size, it will be split into chunks, and somehow signaled within its protocol.

To deal with such streams, we need several things to trigger from. We need to know that this packet is part of a multi-packet sequence. We need to know how many packets are in the sequence. We also need to know when we have all the packets.

For this example we’ll assume there is a simple in-protocol signaling mechanism to give details. A flag byte that signals the presence of a multi-packet sequence and also the last packet, followed by an ID of the sequence and a packet sequence number.

msg_pkt ::= SEQUENCE {
    .....
    flags ::= SEQUENCE {
        fragment    BOOLEAN,
        last_fragment   BOOLEAN,
    .....
    }
    msg_id  INTEGER(0..65535),
    frag_id INTEGER(0..65535),
    .....
}

Reassembling fragments - Part 1. 

#include <epan/reassemble.h>
   ...
save_fragmented = pinfo->fragmented;
flags = tvb_get_uint8(tvb, offset); offset++;
if (flags & FL_FRAGMENT) { /* fragmented */
    tvbuff_t* new_tvb = NULL;
    fragment_data *frag_msg = NULL;
    uint16_t msg_seqid = tvb_get_ntohs(tvb, offset); offset += 2;
    uint16_t msg_num = tvb_get_ntohs(tvb, offset); offset += 2;

    pinfo->fragmented = true;
    frag_msg = fragment_add_seq_check(msg_reassembly_table,
        tvb, offset, pinfo,
        msg_seqid, NULL, /* ID for fragments belonging together */
        msg_num, /* fragment sequence number */
        tvb_captured_length_remaining(tvb, offset), /* fragment length - to the end */
        flags & FL_FRAG_LAST); /* More fragments? */

We start by saving the fragmented state of this packet, so we can restore it later. Next comes some protocol specific stuff, to dig the fragment data out of the stream if it’s present. Having decided it is present, we let the function fragment_add_seq_check() do its work. We need to provide this with a certain amount of parameters:

Reassembling fragments part 2. 

    new_tvb = process_reassembled_data(tvb, offset, pinfo,
        "Reassembled Message", frag_msg, &msg_frag_items,
        NULL, msg_tree);

    if (frag_msg) { /* Reassembled */
        col_append_str(pinfo->cinfo, COL_INFO,
                " (Message Reassembled)");
    } else { /* Not last packet of reassembled Short Message */
        col_append_fstr(pinfo->cinfo, COL_INFO,
                " (Message fragment %u)", msg_num);
    }

    if (new_tvb) { /* take it all */
        next_tvb = new_tvb;
    } else { /* make a new subset */
        next_tvb = tvb_new_subset_remaining(tvb, offset);
    }
}
else { /* Not fragmented */
    next_tvb = tvb_new_subset_remaining(tvb, offset);
}

.....
pinfo->fragmented = save_fragmented;

Having passed the fragment data to the reassembly handler, we can now check if we have the whole message. If there is enough information, this routine will return the newly reassembled data buffer.

After that, we add a couple of informative messages to the display to show that this is part of a sequence. Then a bit of manipulation of the buffers and the dissection can proceed. Normally you will probably not bother dissecting further unless the fragments have been reassembled as there won’t be much to find. Sometimes the first packet in the sequence can be partially decoded though if you wish.

Now the mysterious data we passed into the fragment_add_seq_check().

Reassembling fragments - Initialisation. 

static reassembly_table reassembly_table;

static void
proto_register_msg(void)
{
    reassembly_table_register(&msg_reassemble_table,
        &addresses_ports_reassembly_table_functions);
}

First a reassembly_table structure is declared and initialised in the protocol initialisation routine. The second parameter specifies the functions that should be used for identifying fragments. We will use addresses_ports_reassembly_table_functions in order to identify fragments by the given sequence number (msg_seqid), the source and destination addresses and ports from the packet.

Following that, a fragment_items structure is allocated and filled in with a series of ett items, hf data items, and a string tag. The ett and hf values should be included in the relevant tables like all the other variables your protocol may use. The hf variables need to be placed in the structure something like the following. Of course the names may need to be adjusted.

Reassembling fragments - Data. 

...
static int hf_msg_fragments;
static int hf_msg_fragment;
static int hf_msg_fragment_overlap;
static int hf_msg_fragment_overlap_conflicts;
static int hf_msg_fragment_multiple_tails;
static int hf_msg_fragment_too_long_fragment;
static int hf_msg_fragment_error;
static int hf_msg_fragment_count;
static int hf_msg_reassembled_in;
static int hf_msg_reassembled_length;
...
static int ett_msg_fragment;
static int ett_msg_fragments;
...
static const fragment_items msg_frag_items = {
    /* Fragment subtrees */
    &ett_msg_fragment,
    &ett_msg_fragments,
    /* Fragment fields */
    &hf_msg_fragments,
    &hf_msg_fragment,
    &hf_msg_fragment_overlap,
    &hf_msg_fragment_overlap_conflicts,
    &hf_msg_fragment_multiple_tails,
    &hf_msg_fragment_too_long_fragment,
    &hf_msg_fragment_error,
    &hf_msg_fragment_count,
    /* Reassembled in field */
    &hf_msg_reassembled_in,
    /* Reassembled length field */
    &hf_msg_reassembled_length,
    /* Tag */
    "Message fragments"
};
...
static hf_register_info hf[] =
{
...
{&hf_msg_fragments,
    {"Message fragments", "msg.fragments",
    FT_NONE, BASE_NONE, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_fragment,
    {"Message fragment", "msg.fragment",
    FT_FRAMENUM, BASE_NONE, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_fragment_overlap,
    {"Message fragment overlap", "msg.fragment.overlap",
    FT_BOOLEAN, 0, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_fragment_overlap_conflicts,
    {"Message fragment overlapping with conflicting data",
    "msg.fragment.overlap.conflicts",
    FT_BOOLEAN, 0, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_fragment_multiple_tails,
    {"Message has multiple tail fragments",
    "msg.fragment.multiple_tails",
    FT_BOOLEAN, 0, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_fragment_too_long_fragment,
    {"Message fragment too long", "msg.fragment.too_long_fragment",
    FT_BOOLEAN, 0, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_fragment_error,
    {"Message defragmentation error", "msg.fragment.error",
    FT_FRAMENUM, BASE_NONE, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_fragment_count,
    {"Message fragment count", "msg.fragment.count",
    FT_UINT32, BASE_DEC, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_reassembled_in,
    {"Reassembled in", "msg.reassembled.in",
    FT_FRAMENUM, BASE_NONE, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
{&hf_msg_reassembled_length,
    {"Reassembled length", "msg.reassembled.length",
    FT_UINT32, BASE_DEC, NULL, 0x00, NULL, HFILL } },
...
static int *ett[] =
{
...
&ett_msg_fragment,
&ett_msg_fragments
...

These hf variables are used internally within the reassembly routines to make useful links, and to add data to the dissection. It produces links from one packet to another, such as a partial packet having a link to the fully reassembled packet. Likewise there are back pointers to the individual packets from the reassembled one. The other variables are used for flagging up errors.

A dissector gets a tvbuff_t pointer which holds the payload of a TCP packet. This payload contains the header and data of your application layer protocol.

When dissecting an application layer protocol you cannot assume that each TCP packet contains exactly one application layer message. One application layer message can be split into several TCP packets.

You also cannot assume that a TCP packet contains only one application layer message and that the message header is at the start of your TCP payload. More than one messages can be transmitted in one TCP packet, so that a message can start at an arbitrary position.

This sounds complicated, but there is a simple solution. tcp_dissect_pdus() does all this tcp packet reassembling for you. This function is implemented in epan/dissectors/packet-tcp.h.

Reassembling TCP fragments. 

#include "config.h"

#include <epan/packet.h>
#include <epan/prefs.h>
#include "packet-tcp.h"

...

#define FRAME_HEADER_LEN 8

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

/* determine PDU length of protocol foo */
static unsigned
get_foo_message_len(packet_info *pinfo _U_, tvbuff_t *tvb, int offset, void *data _U_)
{
    /* TODO: change this to your needs */
    return (unsigned)tvb_get_ntohl(tvb, offset+4); /* e.g. length is at offset 4 */
}

/* The main dissecting routine */
static int
dissect_foo(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo, proto_tree *tree, void *data)
{
    tcp_dissect_pdus(tvb, pinfo, tree, true, FRAME_HEADER_LEN,
                     get_foo_message_len, dissect_foo_message, data);
    return tvb_captured_length(tvb);
}

...

As you can see this is really simple. Just call tcp_dissect_pdus() in your main dissection routine and move you message parsing code into another function. This function gets called whenever a message has been reassembled.

The parameters tvb, pinfo, tree and data are just handed over to tcp_dissect_pdus(). The 4th parameter is a flag to indicate if the data should be reassembled or not. This could be set according to a dissector preference as well. Parameter 5 indicates how much data has at least to be available to be able to determine the length of the foo message. Parameter 6 is a function pointer to a method that returns this length. It gets called when at least the number of bytes given in the previous parameter is available. Parameter 7 is a function pointer to your real message dissector. Parameter 8 is the data passed in from parent dissector.

Protocols which need more data before the message length can be determined can return zero. Other values smaller than the fixed length will result in an exception.

Given that you have a tap interface for the protocol, you can use this to produce some interesting statistics (well presumably interesting!) from protocol traces.

This can be done in a separate plugin, or in the same plugin that is doing the dissection. The latter scheme is better, as the tap and stats module typically rely on sharing protocol specific data, which might get out of step between two different plugins.

Here is a mechanism to produce statistics from the above TAP interface.

Initialising a stats interface. 

#include <epan/stats_tree.h>

void proto_reg_handoff_foo(void) {
       ...
    stats_tree_register("foo", "foo", "Foo" STATS_TREE_MENU_SEPARATOR "Packet Types", 0,
        foo_stats_tree_packet, foo_stats_tree_init, NULL);
}

The interface entry point, proto_reg_handoff_foo(), calls the stats_tree_register() function, which takes three strings, an integer, and three callback functions:

In this case we only need the first two functions, as there is nothing specific to clean up.

	Note
	If you are registering statistics from a plugin, then your plugin should have a plugin interface entry point called plugin_register_tap_listener(), which should call stats_tree_register_plugin() instead of stats_tree_register().

Initialising a stats session. 

static const uint8_t* st_str_packets = "Total Packets";
static const uint8_t* st_str_packet_types = "FOO Packet Types";
static int st_node_packets = -1;
static int st_node_packet_types = -1;

static void foo_stats_tree_init(stats_tree* st)
{
    st_node_packets = stats_tree_create_node(st, st_str_packets, 0, STAT_DT_INT, true);
    st_node_packet_types = stats_tree_create_pivot(st, st_str_packet_types, st_node_packets);
}

In this case we create a new tree node, to handle the total packets, and as a child of that we create a pivot table to handle the stats about different packet types.

Generating the stats. 

static tap_packet_status foo_stats_tree_packet(stats_tree* st, packet_info* pinfo, epan_dissect_t* edt, const void* p, tap_flags_t flags)
{
    struct FooTap *pi = (struct FooTap *)p;
    tick_stat_node(st, st_str_packets, 0, false);
    stats_tree_tick_pivot(st, st_node_packet_types,
            val_to_str(pi->packet_type, packettypenames, "Unknown packet type (%d)"));
    return TAP_PACKET_REDRAW;
}

In this case the processing of the stats is quite simple. First we call the tick_stat_node for the st_str_packets packet node, to count packets. Then a call to stats_tree_tick_pivot() on the st_node_packet_types subtree allows us to record statistics by packet type.

	Note
	Notice that stats trees and pivots are identified by their name string, not by the identifier returned by stats_tree_create_node()/stats_tree_create_pivot().

Now that you’re familiar with how taps work, you can also use them to allow your dissector to follow streams, if your protocol has that concept, using the Analyze → Follow menu or tshark -z follow.

	Note
	You cannot re-use a previously defined tap for this purpose. You will need to define a separate tap.

Registering a follow tap. 

#include <epan/packet.h>
#include <epan/tap.h>
#include <epan/follow.h>

static int foo_follow_tap;

static int
dissect_foo(tvbuff_t *tvb, packet_info *pinfo, proto_tree *tree, void *data _U_)
{
       ...
    /* We only tap the packet if we're being asked to. */
    if (have_tap_listener(foo_follow_tap)) {

        /* For a follow tap, the userdata argument is
        * the tvbuff containing your protocol's payload data.
        * That may *not* be the entire tvbuff, as it is here.
        */
        tap_queue_packet(foo_follow_tap, pinfo, tvb);
    }

    return tvb_captured_length(tvb);
}

void proto_register_foo(void)
{
       ...
    foo_follow_tap = register_tap("foo_follow");
    register_follow_stream(proto_foo, "foo_follow",
            foo_follow_conv_filter,
            foo_follow_index_filter,
            foo_follow_address_filter,
            foo_port_to_display,
            foo_follow_tap_listener,
            get_foo_stream_count,
            foo_get_substream_id);

The arguments to register_follow_stream() are an integer, a string, and several callback functions:

If your protocol is carried over TCP or UDP, and its streams can be found using IP addresses and ports, then you may be able to use some or all of the standard callback functions defined for this purpose:

If your protocol is not carried over TCP or UDP, or if you have more complex needs than these functions can provide, you can create your own callbacks. Refer to the above functions in the source code to see their arguments, return types, and what they do.

As you have probably guessed from the name, idl2wrs takes a user specified IDL file and attempts to build a dissector that can decode the IDL traffic over GIOP. The resulting file is “C” code, that should compile okay as a Wireshark dissector.

idl2wrs parses the data struct given to it by the omniidl compiler, and using the GIOP API available in packet-giop.[ch], generates get_CDR_xxx calls to decode the CORBA traffic on the wire.

It consists of 4 main files.

It is important to understand what CORBA traffic looks like over GIOP/IIOP, and to help build a tool that can assist in troubleshooting CORBA interworking. This was especially the case after seeing a lot of discussions about how particular IDL types are represented inside an octet stream.

I have also had comments/feedback that this tool would be good for say a CORBA class when teaching students what CORBA traffic looks like “on the wire”.

It is also COOL to work on a great Open Source project such as the case with “Wireshark” (https://www.wireshark.org/).

To use the idl2wrs to generate Wireshark dissectors, you need the following:

To use idl2wrs to generate an Wireshark dissector from an idl file use the following procedure:

For the next steps, go up to the top of your Wireshark source directory.

See the TODO list inside packet-giop.c

The -p ./ option passed to omniidl indicates that the wireshark_be.py and wireshark_gen.py are residing in the current directory. This may need tweaking if you place these files somewhere else.

If it complains about being unable to find some modules (e.g. tempfile.py), you may want to check if PYTHONPATH is set correctly.