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Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] New Protocol encapsulation as plugin

Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 12:16:20 +0100

Hi,

we use a custom dissector to analyze custom protocol traffic. However, to further increase the usability, we need to add protocol analysis specific GUI elements. For now, we are not aware of a way to add a first level plugin which can be called through an encapsulation type from a pcap file. One other point is that we are not able to load a compiled plugin to wireshark, if we don’t build it from source. We can’t link against wireshark and cmake will not load the project if we install wireshark from the APT packages.

  1. Are implementations available to add an encapsulation type via a plugin?
  2. Could anybody point us to examples of similar attempts?
  3. Is there already some work in progress to provide such a plugin mechanism for extending the encapsulation types?
  4. We noticed that distributed packets, e.g. in Ubuntu 18.04 do not allow for C plugins to be loaded. Do you know if this is common practice?
Our goal is creating an open source tool to analyze communication within SoCs, e.g. SoC FPGAs by providing both insight into protocol structure as well as bit and timing accurate analysis at the same time with cross-references.
You may think about this like an analyzer for video data transport protocols, which provides the ability to cross-reference actual pixels within the frames to the protocol entities that has contained them by showing the picture and enables clicking through the pixels / areas of the frames and the frames within the timeline of the video. When you click on an images pixel/area, the respective protocol unit containing the pixel is highlighted and vice versa. This allows for much better interpretation than going through the payload view or the image separately.

We already built a proof of concept, but we feel that this approach to basically create a fork of the wireshark GUI is neither maintainable and efficient nor something the community is looking for.
We are seeking for any comment/reply or proposals to advance and/or continue this idea!

Björn Petersen