Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [ethereal-dev] encryption in protocols...

["Neulinger, Nathan R." <nneul@xxxxxxx>]

The tacplus protocol (a skeletal dissector to be committed shortly) is
weakly encrypted. 

Do we have any ideas on supporting a way to pass information to a dissector?
For example, I'd like to be able to tell the tacplus dissector - use this
encryption key to decrypt the results.

As far as I know, the only thing it uses is MD5 to generate a hash, which
there should be any export concerns with. (But I'm not an expert.)

A thought I had would be for their to be a new set of routines that would
allow any dissectors to extend the preferences dialog with additional
requested information. Even if it was just a specification of a list of
fields, and what types they were. (Spreadsheet style) This could allow
customizing the behavior of individual dissectors, as well as providing
external data input, such as decryption keys. 

Don't worry, I haven't added any encryption code to ethereal. For now,
tacplus just does "request/response" and not much else, but it would be nice
to expand it some.

-- Nathan

------------------------------------------------------------
Nathan Neulinger                       EMail:  nneul@xxxxxxx
University of Missouri - Rolla         Phone: (573) 341-4841
Computing Services                       Fax: (573) 341-4216