wireshark/wiresharkCapture and analyze network traffic with deep packet inspection, protocol decoding across hundreds of protocols, and capture-file support for troubleshooting, forensics, and security investigations.
Wireshark is a network traffic analyzer, or "sniffer", for Linux, macOS, *BSD and other Unix and Unix-like operating systems and for Windows. It uses Qt, a graphical user interface library, and libpcap and npcap as packet capture and filtering libraries.
The Wireshark distribution also comes with TShark, which is a line-oriented sniffer (similar to Sun's snoop or tcpdump) that uses the same dissection, capture-file reading and writing, and packet filtering code as Wireshark, and with editcap, which is a program to read capture files and write the packets from that capture file, possibly in a different capture file format, and with some packets possibly removed from the capture.
The official home of Wireshark is https://www.wireshark.org.
The latest distribution can be found in the subdirectory https://www.wireshark.org/download
The Wireshark project builds and tests regularly on the following platforms:
Official installation packages are available for Microsoft Windows and macOS.
It is available as either a standard or add-on package for many popular operating systems and Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Arch, Gentoo, openSUSE, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
Additionally it is available through many third-party packaging systems such as pkgsrc, OpenCSW, Homebrew, and MacPorts.
It should run on other Unix-ish systems without too much trouble.
In some cases the current version of Wireshark might not support your operating system. This is the case for Windows XP, which is supported by Wireshark 1.10 and earlier. In other cases the standard package for Wireshark might simply be old. This is the case for Solaris and HP-UX.
Python 3 is needed to build Wireshark. AsciiDoctor is required to build the documentation, including the man pages. Perl and flex are required to generate some of the source code.
You must therefore install Python 3, AsciiDoctor, and GNU "flex" (vanilla "lex" won't work) on systems that lack them. You might need to install Perl as well.
Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file and in the Developer's Guide at https://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsdg_html_chunked/
See also the appropriate README.OS files for OS-specific installation instructions.
In order to capture packets from the network, you need to make the
dumpcap program set-UID to root or you need to have access to the
appropriate entry under /dev if your system is so inclined (BSD-derived
systems, and systems such as Solaris and HP-UX that support DLPI,
typically fall into this category). Although it might be tempting to
make the Wireshark and TShark executables setuid root, or to run them as
root please don't. The capture process has been isolated in dumpcap;
this simple program is less likely to contain security holes and is thus
safer to run as root.
Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line option and interface feature.
Wireshark can read packets from a number of different file types. See the Wireshark man page or the Wireshark User's Guide for a list of supported file formats.
Wireshark can transparently read compressed versions of any of those files if the required compression library was available when Wireshark was compiled. Currently supported compression formats are:
GZIP and LZ4 (when using independent blocks, which is the default) support
fast random seeking, which offers much better GUI performance on large files.
Any of these compression formats can be disabled at compile time by passing
the corresponding option to cmake, i.e., cmake -DENABLE_ZLIB=OFF,
cmake -DENABLE_LZ4=OFF, or cmake -DENABLE_ZSTD=OFF.
Although Wireshark can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The iptrace command
starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Wireshark
will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
other packets. If this occurs, please let the Wireshark developers know
at [email protected]; be sure to send us a copy of that trace
file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
generated by the MAX and Pipeline series of products. Wireshark can read
the output of the wandsession, wandisplay, wannext, and wdd
commands.
Wireshark can also read dump trace output from the Toshiba "Compact Router"
line of ISDN routers (TR-600 and TR-650). You can telnet to the router
and start a dump session with snoop dump.
CoSine L2 debug output can also be read by Wireshark. To get the L2
debug output first enter the diags mode and then use
create-pkt-log-profile and apply-pkt-lozg-profile commands under
layer-2 category. For more detail how to use these commands, you
should examine the help command by layer-2 create ? or layer-2 apply ?.
To use the Lucent/Ascend, Toshiba and CoSine traces with Wireshark, you must
capture the trace output to a file on disk. The trace is happening inside
the router and the router has no way of saving the trace to a file for you.
An easy way of doing this under Unix is to run telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>.
Or, if your system has the "script" command installed, you can save
a shell session, including telnet, to a file. For example to log to a file
named tracefile.out:
$ script tracefile.out
Script started on <date/time>
$ telnet router
..... do your trace, then exit from the router's telnet session.
$ exit
Script done on <date/time>
Wireshark will attempt to use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv4 and IPv6 packets.
If you want to turn off name resolution while using Wireshark, start
Wireshark with the -n option to turn off all name resolution (including
resolution of MAC addresses and TCP/UDP/SMTP port numbers to names) or
with the -N mt option to turn off name resolution for all
network-layer addresses (IPv4, IPv6, IPX).
You can make that the default setting by opening the Preferences dialog using the Preferences item in the Edit menu, selecting "Name resolution", turning off the appropriate name resolution options, and clicking "OK".
Wireshark can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets; it can also use
the libsmi library to do more sophisticated decoding by reading MIB
files and using the information in those files to display OIDs and
variable binding values in a friendlier fashion. CMake will automatically
determine whether you have the libsmi library on your system. If you
have the libsmi library but do not want Wireshark to use it, you can run
cmake with the -DENABLE_SMI=OFF option.
Wireshark is under constant development, so it is possible that you will encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs at https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues. Be sure you enter into the bug:
The complete build information from the "About Wireshark"
item in the Help menu or the output of wireshark -v for
Wireshark bugs and the output of tshark -v for TShark bugs;
If the bug happened on Linux, the Linux distribution you were using, and the version of that distribution;
The command you used to invoke Wireshark, if you ran Wireshark from the command line, or TShark, if you ran TShark, and the sequence of operations you performed that caused the bug to appear.