Wireshark · News

What's New

Wireshark 4.4.0 Released

August 28, 2024

What’s New

Many improvements and fixes to the graphing dialogs, including I/O Graphs, Flow Graph / VoIP Calls, and TCP Stream Graphs.

Wireshark now supports automatic profile switching. You can associate a display filter with a configuration profile, and when you open a capture file that matches the filter, Wireshark will automatically switch to that profile.

Support for Lua 5.3 and 5.4 has been added, and support for Lua 5.1 and 5.2 has been removed. The Windows and macOS installers now ship with Lua 5.4.6.

Improved display filter support for value strings (optional string representations for numeric fields).

Display filter functions can be implemented as plugins, similar to protocol dissectors and file parsers.

Display filters can be translated to pcap filters using Edit › Copy › Display filter as pcap filter if each display filter field has a corresponding pcap filter equivalent.

Custom columns can be defined using any valid field expression, such as display filter functions, packet slices, arithmetic calculations, logical tests, raw byte addressing, and protocol layer modifiers.

Custom output fields for tshark -e can also be defined using any valid field expression.

Wireshark can be built with the zlib-ng instead of zlib for compressed file support. Zlib-ng is substantially faster than zlib. The official Windows and macOS packages include this feature.

Many other improvements have been made. See the “New and Updated Features” section below for more details.

New and Updated Features

The following features are either new or have been significantly updated since version 4.2.0:

The Windows installers now ship with Npcap 1.79. They previously shipped with Npcap 1.78.

Improvements to the "I/O Graphs" dialog:
- A number of crasher bugs have been fixed.
- The protocol tree context menu can open a I/O graph of the currently selected field. Issue 11362
- Smaller intervals can be used, down to 1 microsecond. Issue 13682
- A larger number of I/O Graph item buckets can be used, up to 2²⁵ (33 million) items. Issue 8460
- The size of individual graph items has been reduced, which reduces memory utilization.
- When the Y field or Y axis changes, the graph displays the new graph correctly, retapping if necessary, instead of displaying information based on stale data.
- The graph is smarter about choosing whether to retap (expensive), recalculate (moderately intensive), or replot (cheap) in order to display the newly chosen options correctly with the least amount of calculations. For instance, a graph that has previously been plotted and is disabled and then reenabled without any other changes will not require a new retap. Issue 15822
- LOAD graphs are graphed properly again. Issue 18450
- Y axes have human readable units with SI prefixes. Issue 12827
- Bar widths are scaled to the size of the interval.
- Bar border colors are a slightly darker color than that of the graph itself, instead of always black. Issue 17422
- Time values have the correct width when axes are automatically reset.
- The precision of the interval time shown in the hint message depends on the interval.
- The tracer follows the currently selected row on the table of graphs, and does not appear on an invisible graph.
- The tracer moves to the frame selected in the main window. Issue 12909
- Pending graph changes are saved when changing profiles when the I/O Graphs dialog is open.
- I/O Graph dialog windows for closed capture files are no longer affected by changing the list of graphs (either in that dialogs or in other dialogs for the currently open file.)
- Newly created temporary graphs, which will not be saved unless the configuration has changed, are more clearly marked with italics.
- When "Time of Day" is selected for a graph, the absolute time will be saved to CSV exports instead of the relative time. Issue 13717
- Graphs can be reordered by dragging and dropping their list entries. Issue 13855
- The graph layer order and legend order always matches the order in the graph list. Legends also appear properly. Issue 13854
- The legend can be moved to other corners of the graph by right-clicking on it and selecting its new location from a menu.
- For purposes of displaying zero values, graphs with both lines and data point symbols are treated as line graphs, not scatter plots.
- Logarithmic ticks are used when the Y axis is logarithmic.
- The graph crosshairs context menu option works.
- You can resize the graph list columns to their contents by right clicking on the list header. Issue 18102
- The graph is more responsive to mouse movement, especially on Linux Wayland.
Improvements to the Sequence Diagram (Flow Graphs and VoIP Calls):
- When exporting the graph as an image, the entire graph is shown with up to 1000 items instead of only what was visible on-screen. This value can be increased in the preferences. Issue 13504
- Endpoints that share the same address now have two distinct nodes with a line between them. Issue 12038
- The "Comment" column can be resized by selecting the axis between the "Comment" column and the graph and dragging, and auto-resized by double-clicking the column. Issue 4972
- Tooltips are shown for elided comments.
- The scroll direction via keyboard is no longer reversed. Issue 12932
- The column widths are fixed instead of resizing slightly depending on the visible entries. Issue 12931
- The Y axis labels stay in the correct position without having to click the Reset button.
- The progress bar appears correctly in the Flow Graph (non VoIP Calls).
- The behavior of the "Any" and "Network" combobox is corrected. Issue 19818
- "Limit to Display Filter" is checked if a display filter is applied when the Flow Graph is opened, per the documentation.
TCP Stream Graphs:
- A better decision is made about which side is the server and thus the initially chosen direction in the graph.
- The "Window Scaling" graph axis labels are corrected and show both graphs.
- The graph crosshairs context menu option works.
- Switching between relative and absolute sequence numbers works again.
The "Follow Stream" dialog can now show delta times between turns and all packets and events.
A number of graphs using the QCustomPlot widget ("I/O Graphs", "Flow Graph", "TCP Stream Graphs", and "RTP Player") are more responsive to mouse movement, especially on Linux when Wayland is used.
The "Find Packet" dialog can search backwards and find additional occurrences of a string, hex value, or regular expression in a single frame.
When using "Go To Packet" with an undisplayed frame, the window goes to nearest displayed frame by number. Issue 2988
Display filter syntax enhancements:
- Better handling of comparisons with value strings. Now the display filter engine can correctly handle cases where multiple different numeric values map to the same value string, including but not limited to range-type value strings.
- Fields with value strings now support regular expression matching.
- Date and time values now support arithmetic, with some restrictions: the multiplier/divisor must be an integer or floating point number and appear on the right-hand side of the operator.
- The keyword "bitand" can be used as an alternative syntax for the bitwise-and operator.
- Functions alone can now be used as an entire logical expression. The result of the expression is the truthiness of the function return value (or of all values if more than one). This is useful for example to write "len(something)" instead of "len(something) != 0". Even more so if a function returns itself a boolean value, it is now possible to write "bool_test(some.field)" instead of having to write "bool_test(some.field) == True". Both forms are now valid.
- Display filter references can be written without curly braces. It is now possible to write $frame.number instead of ${frame.number} for example.
- There are new display filter functions which test various IP address properties. Check the wireshark-filter(5) man page for more information.
- There are new display filter functions which convert unsigned integer types to decimal or hexadecimal, and convert fields with value strings into the associated string for their value, which can be used to produce results similar to custom columns. Check the wireshark-filter(5) man page for more information.
- Display filter macros can be written with a semicolon after the macro name before the argument list, e.g. ${mymacro;arg1;…;argN}, instead of ${mymacro:arg1;…;argN}. The version with semicolons works better with pop-up suggestions when editing the display filter, so the version with the colon might be removed in the future.
- Display filter macros can be written using a function-like notation. The macro ${mymacro:arg1;…;argN} can be written $mymacro(arg1,…,argN).
- AX.25 addresses are now filtered using the "CALLSIGN-SSID" string syntax. Filtering based on the raw bytes values is still possible, like other field types, with the @ operator. Issue 17973
Display filter functions can be implemented as libwireshark plugins. Plugins are loaded during startup from the usual binary plugin configuration directories. See the ipaddr.c source file in the distribution for an example of a display filter C plugin and the doc/plugins.example folder for generic instructions how to build a plugin.
Display filter autocompletions now also include display filter functions.
The display filter macro configuration file has changed format. It now uses the same format as the "dfilters" file and has been renamed accordingly to "dmacros". Internally it no longer uses the UAT API and the display filter macro GUI dialog has been updated. There is some basic migration logic implemented but it is advisable to check that the "dfilter_macros" (old) and "dmacros" (new) files in the profile directory are consistent.
Custom columns can be defined using any valid field expression:
- Display filter functions, like len(tcp.payload), including nested functions like min(len(tcp.payload), len(udp.payload)) and newly defined functions using the plugin system mentioned above. Issue 15990 Issue 16181
- Arithmetic calculations, like ip.len * 8 or tcp.srcport + tcp.dstport. Issue 7752
- Slices, like tcp.payload[4:4]. Issue 10154
- The layer operator, like ip.proto#1, which will return the protocol field in the first IPv4 layer if there is tunneling. Issue 18588
- Raw byte addressing, like @ip, which will return the bytes of protocol or FT_NONE fields, among others. Issue 19076
- Logical tests, like tcp.port == 443, which produce a check mark if the test matches (similar to protocol and FT_NONE fields without @.) This works with all logical operators, including e.g. regular expression matching (matches or ~.)
- Defined display filter macros.
- Any combination of the above also works.
- Multifield columns are still available. For backwards compatibility, X or Y is interpreted as a multifield column as before. To represent a logical test for the presence of multiple fields instead of concatenating values, use parenthesis, e.g. (tcp.options.timestamp or tcp.options.nop).
- Field references are not implemented because there’s no sense of a currently selected frame. "Resolved" column values (such as host name resolution or value string lookup) are not supported for any of the new expressions yet.
Custom output fields for tshark -e <field> can also be defined using any valid field expression as above.
- For custom output fields, X or Y is the usual logical test; to output multiple fields use multiple -e terms as before.
- The various -E options, including -E occurrence, all work as expected.
When selecting "Manage Interfaces" from "Capture Options", Wireshark only attempts to reconnect to rpcap hosts that were active in the last session, instead of every remote host that the current profile has ever connected to. Issue 17484
The "Resolved Addresses" dialog only shows what addresses and ports are present in the file (not including information from static files), and selected rows or the entire table can be saved or copied to the clipboard in several formats. Issue 16419
Dumpcap and Wireshark support the -F option when capturing a file on the command line. Issue 18009
When capturing on the command line dumpcap accepts a -Q option that is quieter than -q and prints only errors to standard error, similar to tshark. Issue 14491
When capturing a file and requesting the pcap format, nanosecond resolution time stamps will be written if the device and version of libpcap supports it.
When capturing using a file size autostop or ring buffer condition, the maximum value is now 2 TB, up from 2GiB. Note that you may have problems when the number of packets gets larger than 2³¹ or 2³², though that is also true when no limit is set.
When capturing files in multiple file mode, a pattern that places the date and time before the index number can be used (e.g., foo_20240714110102_00001.pcap instead of foo_00001_20240714110102.pcap). This makes file names sortable in chronological order across file sets from different captures. The "File Set" dialog has been updated to handle the new pattern, which has been capable of being produced by tshark since version 3.6.0.
Adding interfaces at startup is about twice as fast, and has many fewer UAC pop-ups when Npcap is installed with access restricted to Administrators on Windows.
The Lua version included with the Windows and macOS installers has been updated to 5.4. While we have tried to help with backward compatibility by including lua_bitop library with Lua 5.3 and 5.4 in addition to the native Lua support for bit operations present in those versions, different versions of Lua are not guaranteed to be compatible. If a Lua dissector has issues, check the manuals for Lua 5.4, Lua 5.3, and Lua 5.2 for incompatibilities and suggested workarounds. Note that features marked as deprecated in one version are removed in the subsequent version without additional notice, so it can be worth checking the manual for previous versions.
Lua scripts in the plugins directories are now initially loaded via the same internal Lua methods as require(). This avoids errors from loading plugins twice, once by scanning the directory initially, and once by require(), and also results in globals defined in plugins entering the global namespace. Previously globals defined in plugins only entered the global namespace when placed in the global plugins directory, but not the personal plugins directory. Using globals in plugins remains deprecated style (both by Wireshark and in Lua generally), that should be avoided via using other methods. Issue 18589
Lua functions have been added to decompress and decode TvbRanges with other compression types besides zlib, such as Brotli, Snappy, Zstd, and others, matching the support in the C API. tvbrange:uncompress() has been deprecated in favor of tvbrange:uncompress_zlib().
Lua Dumper now defaults to the pcapng file type, and to per-packet encapsulation (creating interfaces on demand as necessary) when writing pcapng Issue 16403
Editcap has an --extract-secrets option to extract embedded decryption secrets from a capture file. Issue 18197
Global profiles can be used in tshark by using --global-profile option.
Capture files can be saved with LZ4 compression. LZ4 has an emphasis on speed and may be particularly useful for large files.
Fast random access is supported with LZ4 compressed files when compressed with independent blocks, which is the default. This provides much more responsive GUI performance when jumping to different packets. Fast random access has been supported with gzip compressed files since version 1.8.0, but this is not supported for Zstd compressed files.
Mergecap, Editcap, TShark and Text2pcap have an --compress option to compress output to different formats. For now, it supports the gzip and LZ4 compression formats. When the option is not given, the desired compression format can also be deduced from the output filename extension, e.g. gzip for .gz.
Wireshark’s Git repostory tags are now signed using SSH. See the Developer’s Guide for more details.

Removed Features and Support

The tshark -G option with no argument is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Use tshark -G fields to produce the same report.

Removed Dissectors

The Parlay dissector has been removed.

New Protocol Support

Allied Telesis Resiliency Link (AT RL), ATN Security Label, Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER), Bus Mirroring Protocol, EGNOS Message Server (EMS) file format, Galileo E1-B I/NAV navigation messages, IBM i RDMA Endpoint (iRDMA-EDP), IWBEMSERVICES, MAC NR Framed (mac-nr-framed), Matter Bluetooth Transport Protocol (MatterBTP), MiWi P2P Star, Monero, NMEA 0183, PLDM, RDP authentication redirection virtual channel protocol (rdpear), RF4CE Network Layer (RF4CE), RF4CE Profile (RF4CE Profile), RK512, SAP Remote Function Call (SAPRFC), SBAS L1 Navigation Message, Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE), TREL, WMIO, and ZeroMQ Message Transport Protocol (ZMTP)

Updated Protocol Support

IPv6: The "show address detail" preference is now enabled by default. The address details provided have been extended to include more special purpose address block properties (forwardable, globally-routable, etc).

Too many other protocol updates have been made to list them all here.

New and Updated Capture File Support

EGNOS Messager Server (EMS) files

New and Updated Capture Interfaces support

u-blox GNSS receivers

Major API Changes

The entire code base has been updated to use C99 types instead of GLib types. This includes changing occurrences gboolean, which is an integer, to C99’s native bool type in many places. See issue 19116 for more details.
The tvb_get_guintX and tvb_get_gintX functions in the tvbuff API have been renamed to tvb_get_uintX and tvb_get_intX (the GLib-style "g" has been removed). You can still use the old-style names, but they have been deprecated.
Plugins should provide a plugin_describe() function that returns an ORed list of flags consisting of the plugin types used. See wsutil/plugins.h for details.