Again two more commonly used network protocols for the Ultimate PCAP: the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) and the Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System Plus (TACACS+) protocols. Captured with quite some details:

Again two more commonly used network protocols for the Ultimate PCAP: the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) and the Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System Plus (TACACS+) protocols. Captured with quite some details:
At SharkFest’22 EU, the Annual Wireshark User and Developer Conference, I attended a beginners’ course called “Network Troubleshooting from Scratch”, taught by the great Jasper Bongertz. In the end, we had some high-level discussions concerning various things, one of them was the insight that TCP RSTs are not only sent from a server in case the port is closed, but are also commonly sent (aka spoofed) from firewalls in case a security policy denies the connection. Key question: Can you distinguish between those spoofed vs. real TCP RSTs? Initially, I thought: no, you can’t, cause the firewalls out there do a great job.
It turned out: you can!
In general, Network Address Translation (NAT) solves some problems but should be avoided wherever possible. It has nothing to do with security and is only a short-term solution on the way to IPv6. (Yes, I know, the last 20 years have proven that NAT is used everywhere every time. 😉) This applies to all kinds of NATs for IPv4 (SNAT, DNAT, PAT) as well as for NPTv6 and NAT66.
However, there are two types of NATs that do not only change the network addresses but do a translation between the two Internet Protocols, that is IPv4 <-> IPv6 and vice versa. Let’s focus on NAT46 this time. In which situations is it used and why? Supplemented by a configuration guide for the FortiGates, a downloadable PCAP and Wireshark screenshots.
Continue reading Accessing IPv6-only Resources via Legacy IP: NAT46 on a FortiGate
For some reason, I came across a blog post by Gian Paolo called Small servers. This reminded me of some fairly old network protocols (that no one uses as far as I know) that are not in my Ultimate PCAP yet. Hence I took some minutes, captured them, and took some Wireshark screenshots. They are: echo, discard, daytime, chargen, and time. Mostly via TCP and UDP, and, as you would have expected, IPv6 and legacy IP.
I’m aware that this is not of interest to most of you. :) But for the sake of completeness, and because I love adding new protocols to the Ultimate PCAP, I added them though.
This is a guest blog post by Erik Hjelmvik, an expert in network forensics and network security monitoring at NETRESEC.
PolarProxy is a transparent TLS proxy that outputs decrypted TLS traffic as PCAP files. PolarProxy doesn’t interfere with the tunnelled data in any way, it simply takes the incoming TLS stream, decrypts it, re-encrypts it and forwards it to the destination. Because of this PolarProxy can be used as a generic TLS decryption proxy for just about any protocol that uses TLS encryption, including HTTPS, HTTP/2, DoH, DoT, FTPS, SMTPS, IMAPS, POP3S and SIP-TLS.
PolarProxy is primarily designed for inspecting otherwise encrypted traffic from malware, such as botnets that use HTTPS for command-and-control of victim PCs. Other popular use cases for PolarProxy is to inspect encrypted traffic from IoT devices and other embedded products or to analyze otherwise encrypted traffic from mobile phones and tablets. The fact that PolarProxy exports the decrypted traffic in a decrypted format without any TLS headers also enables users to inspect the decrypted traffic with products that don’t support TLS decryption, such as intrusion detection and network forensics products like Suricata, Zeek and NetworkMiner.
Uh, I wasn’t aware of so many different printing protocols. Do you? While I was trying to solve a little printing problem I took a packet capture of three different printing variants over TCP/IP: Raw via TCP port 9100, LPD/LPR via TCP port 515, and Apple’s AirPrint which uses the Internet Printing Protocol IPP. As always, you can download this pcap and have a look at it by yourself.
For the last couple of years, I captured many different network and upper-layer protocols and published the pcaps along with some information and Wireshark screenshots on this blog. However, it sometimes takes me some time to find the correct pcap when I am searching for a concrete protocol example. There are way too many pcaps out there.
This is supposed to change now:
I am using the WHOIS client a lot these days since I am migrating some RIPE objects such as ASes, inetnum/inet6num, etc. Meanwhile, I recognized that I have never captured this TCP port 43 protocol, nor looked at it with Wireshark. That’s what this post is all about, incl. a downloadable pcap for your own analysis.
VoIP calls, using the network protocols SIP/SDP and RTP, are the de-facto standard when it comes to voice calls. Wireshark offers some special features to analyze those calls and RTP streams – even with a nice “Play Streams” option, which discretely decodes your calls. Ouch. Again and again, frightening which privacy-related protocols are completely unencrypted on the Internet!
Here are some hints for Wireshark as well as a downloadable pcap with three calls in there. ;) Have fun!
Some time ago I published a post called DNS Test Names & Resource Records which lists many different FQDNs with lots of different RRs. You can use those public available DNS names to test your DNS servers or the like. However, I was missing a packet capture showing all these resource records as they appear on the wire. So now, here it is. If you are searching for some packets to test your tools for whatever reason, feel free to download this pcap.
This is a guest blogpost by Martin Langer, Ph.D. student for “Secured Time Synchronization Using Packet-Based Time Protocols” at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
In the previous posts, I already introduced the Network Time Security (NTS) protocol and described the most important features. Although the specification process has not been completed, there are already some independent NTS implementations and public time servers (IETF106). NTPsec is one of the important representatives of this series and already offers an advanced NTS solution. In this post, I’ll give you a short guide to setting up an NTS-secured NTP client/server with NTPsec.
I am currently working on a network & security training, module “OSI Layer 4 – Transport”. Therefore I made a very basic demo of a TCP and UDP connection in order to see the common “SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK” for TCP while none of them for UDP, “Follow TCP/UDP Stream” in Wireshark, and so on. I wanted to show that it’s not that complicated at all. Every common application/service simply uses these data streams to transfer data aka bytes between a client and a server.
That is: Here are the Linux commands for basic lab, a downloadable pcap, and, as always, some Wireshark screenshots:
Continue reading Basic TCP and UDP Demos w/ netcat and telnet
During my analysis of NTP and its traffic to my NTP servers listed in the NTP Pool Project I discovered many ICMP error messages coming back to my servers such as port unreachables, address unreachables, time exceeded or administratively prohibited. Strange. In summary, more than 3 % of IPv6-enabled NTP clients failed in getting answers from my servers. Let’s have a closer look:
Continue reading Incorrect Working IPv6 NTP Clients/Networks
It’s not always this simple DNS thing such as “single query – single answer, both via UDP”. Sometimes you have some more options or bigger messages that look and behave differently on the network. For example: IP fragmentation for larger DNS answers that do not fit into a single UDP datagram (hopefully not after the DNS flag day 2020 anymore), or DNS via TCP, or some newer options within the EDNS space such as “EDNS Client Subnet” (ECS) or DNS cookies.
I won’t explain any details about those options, but I am publishing a pcap with that kind of packets along with some Wireshark screenshots. Feel free to dig into it.
Continue reading DNS Capture: UDP, TCP, IP-Fragmentation, EDNS, ECS, Cookie
Since my last blogposts covered many 6in4 IPv6 tunnel setups (1, 2, 3) I took a packet capture of some tunneled IPv6 sessions to get an idea how these packets look like on the wire. Feel free to download this small pcap and to have a look at it by yourself.
A couple of spontaneous challenges from the pcap round things up. ;)