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In computing, Wireshark, the new name for Ethereal, is a protocol analyzer, or "packet sniffer" application, used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features of a protocol analyzer. The functionality Wireshark provides is very similar to tcpdump (c.f.), but it has a GUI front-end, and many more information sorting and filtering options. It allows the user to see all traffic being passed over the network (usually an Ethernet network but support is being added for others) by putting the network card into promiscuous mode. Wireshark is released under an open-source license, and it uses the cross-platform GTK+ widget toolkit. It runs on Windows, Unix and Unix-compatible systems, including Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X (although GTK+ only works with X11 on Mac OS X, so the user will need to run an X server such as X11.app). Wireshark is software that "understands" the structure of different network protocols. Thus it's able to display encapsulation and single fields and interpret their meaning. Wireshark uses Pcap to capture packets, so it can only capture on networks supported by Pcap.
History Out of necessity, Gerald Combs (a computer science graduate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City) started writing the Ethereal code so that he could have a tool to capture and analyze packets; he released the first version around 1998. Pretty soon, this GPLed protocol analyzer caught on. As of now there are over 500 contributing authors while Gerald continues to maintain the overall code and issues releases of new versions. The entire list of authors is available from Wireshark's web-site. 8 June 2006 -- When creator and lead developer Gerald Combs moved to a new job, his former employer, which held the Ethereal trademark for the Ethereal network analyzer, would not come to an agreement allowing him to keep the trademark. He still held the copyright on the Ethereal source code, so he took the Subversion repository for Ethereal and used it as the basis for the Subversion repository of Wireshark. Because he had no rights to the Ethereal trademark and name, he could not use it with his new project. The trademark holders of Ethereal have not made any statements about Wireshark, and Ethereal development appears to have ceased. Features Security Capturing raw network traffic from an interface requires special privileges on some platforms. For this reason, Wireshark often runs with superuser privileges (even on platforms where capturing raw network traffic doesn't require that). Taking into account the huge number of protocol dissectors, which are called when traffic for their protocol is captured, this can pose a serious security risk given a bug in a dissector. Due to the rather large number of vulnerabilities in the past (of which many even allowed remote code execution) and doubts of developers for better future development, OpenBSD removed Ethereal from its ports tree prior to its 3.6 release. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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