Take for instance the number of lines of code in C files only for dissectors: $ cat epan/dissectors/*.c | wc -l That being said, dumpcap could possibly harm your network configuration and cause serious troubles, so be cautious with whom you give these capabilities (whom you place into the wireshark group).Īnother thing to keep in mind when using Wireshark is that protocol dissectors tend to be buggy due to enormous amount of protocols and code needed to dissect them all. In order to do so, it needs to have certain privileges (specifically CAP_NET_RAW and CAP_NET_ADMIN, see man capabilities for more information). As I said in the previous section, dumpcap does the magic of capturing network traffic.

Discussion about securityĮvery privilege escalation mechanism comes with a certain amount of risk. If you are curious how this privilege escalation works, take a look at dumpcap, which does the magic. loopback) or just tick the Enable promiscuous mode on all interfaces option and press the Start button. In order to start your first capture, select Capture in top menu, then pick one interface (e.g. Then log out and in again a you are ready to go! All you need to do is to add your user account into the group like this, substituting your username for username: $ sudo usermod -a -G wireshark username Users in this group can capture network traffic. Setting permissionsĭuring installation, a system group called wireshark was created. Therefore, we will set up permissions for regular users to capture on network interfaces (see below about security implications). At this point, you can use Wireshark as root, but it is generally considered a bad practice. This will install both Qt and the CLI version of Wireshark.

In order to install the Wireshark GUI from repositories, simply type… $ sudo dnf install wireshark-qt Nevertheless the old GUI is still available and you can choose which one you want to use. You can use it either for real-time network analysis or to inspect files with captured traffic such as pcap files.įor many years, the primary framework for the graphical user interface (GUI) used to be GTK, but since version 2.0, Qt became the framework of a choice. It offers both terminal and graphical user interfaces and both are available on Fedora.

Wireshark is popular tool for network protocol analysis used by education institutions and in the industry.

Download wireshark pcap