Wireshark Introduction and Examining Wireless Frames

Introduction

Guidelines: It’s always best to introduce a paper to the reader. It sets the tone and provides an overview of what will be covered and what the goals are.

• What is the intent of the lab? What issues are addressed? Why is it important? What are the goals?

The goal of this lab is to introduce the student to some of the basic features of the network protocol analyzer Wireshark, and examine the process of capturing and obtaining meaningful use from said captures or wireless frames. Wireshark allows the network administrator to get an in depth look at the “low-level” details of packets that cross our network (whether wireless or wired).

Specific questions from the tutorial

Guidelines: Answer all questions in full college-level sentences and paragraphs.

1. What type of software is Wireshark? Why is this important to users of Wireshark?

It is a Network Protocol Analyzer. The program is useful for network troubleshooting as well as for security purposes.

2. When analyzing a network capture, what data appears in each of Wireshark’s three panes?

Packet list pane shows several categories of data including: the number of the captured packet, the time the packet was captured relative to the beginning of the capture, the source address of the packet, the destination address of the packets, the highest layer protocol of the in the frame, and various “essential” info about the packet itself. The Tree View pane shows the headers of the various protocols encapsulated in the packet. It provides a hierarchical view of the header details. The byte view pane shows the raw data of the capture.

3. What does a display filter do, and when would you use one?

The display filter is useful for narrowing the list of captured packets to just those of interest. Because it captures a lot of different types of network traffic, there may be a lot of data captured that is not pertinent to the user’s goal. For instance, if you wanted to view all TCP packets going through a...