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Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] About Wireshark dissector generators

From: Giorgio Buffa <buffagiorgio@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2016 12:26:49 +0100
Hello list,
I need to write a wireshark dissector for a custom binary protocol with a lot of messages (and with little time available, of course). Last time I've done this by hand (in C), but now I'm looking for an automatic tool; do you have any experience on that topic?

I've found a couple of tools to automatically generate a dissector from (some sort of) message specification. Please consider that I have no formal specification of the protocol messages, but the corresponding C structures are already implemented (and they include bad things such as bitfileds, variable lenght arrays and unions).

* Wireshark Generic Dissector -- The description of your data is read from a text file (it seems awesome)
  <http://wsgd.free.fr/index.html>
* CSjark -- A tool for generating Lua dissectors from C struct definitions to use with Wireshark
  <https://csjark.readthedocs.org/en/latest/>
* Asn2wrs -- Create a dissector from an ASN.1 specification of a protocol (it is work in progress?)
  <https://wiki.wireshark.org/Asn2wrs>

Have you ever used them? It was a success story?  :)
Do you know any other useful tool you would like to suggest?

Thank you and best regards,
Giorgio Buffa.