Wireshark 2.5.0 Release Notes

Table of Contents

1. What is Wireshark?
2. What’s New
2.1. New and Updated Features
2.2. New Protocol Support
2.3. Updated Protocol Support
2.4. New and Updated Capture File Support
2.5. New and Updated Capture Interfaces support
3. Getting Wireshark
3.1. Vendor-supplied Packages
4. File Locations
5. Known Problems
6. Getting Help
7. Frequently Asked Questions

This is a semi-experimental release intended to test new features for Wireshark 2.6.

1. What is Wireshark?

Wireshark is the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer. It is used for troubleshooting, analysis, development and education.

2. What’s New

Many user interface improvements have been made. See the New and Updated Features section below for more details.

2.1. New and Updated Features

The following features are new (or have been significantly updated) since version 2.4.0:

  • Display filter buttons can now be edited, disabled, and removed via a context menu directly from the toolbar
  • Drag & Drop filter fields to the display filter toolbar or edit to create a button on the fly or apply the filter as a display filter.
  • Application startup time has been reduced.
  • Some keyboard shortcut mix-ups have been resolved by assigning new shortcuts to Edit → Copy methods.
  • TShark now supports color using the --color option.
  • The "matches" display filter operator is now case-insensitive.
  • Display expression (button) preferences have been converted to a UAT. This puts the display expressions in their own file. Wireshark still supports preference files that contain the old preferences, but new preference files will be written without the old fields.
  • SMI private enterprise numbers are now read from the "enterprises.tsv" configuration file.
  • The QUIC dissector has been renamed to Google QUIC (quic → gquic).
  • The selected packet number can now be shown in the Status Bar by enabling Preferences → Appearance → Layout → Show selected packet number.
  • File load time in the Status Bar is now disabled by default and can be enabled in Preferences → Appearance → Layout → Show file load time.
  • Support for the G.729A codec in the RTP Player is now added via the bcg729 library.
  • Support for hardware-timestamping of packets has been added.
  • Improved NetMon .cap support with comments, event tracing, network filter, network info types and some Message Analyzer exported types.
  • The personal plugins folder on Linux/Unix is now ~/.local/lib/wireshark/plugins.
  • TShark can print flow graphs using -z flow…
  • Capinfos now prints SHA256 hashes in addition to RIPEMD160 and SHA1. MD5 output has been removed.
  • The packet editor has been removed. (This was a GTK+ only experimental feature.)
  • Support BBC micro:bit Bluetooth profile
  • The Linux and UNIX installation step for Wireshark will now install headers required to build plugins. A pkg-config file is provided to help with this (see doc/plugins.example for details). Note you must still rebuild all plugins between minor releases (X.Y).
  • The Windows installers and packages now ship with Qt 5.9.4.

2.2. New Protocol Support

802.11ax (High Efficiency WLAN (HEW)), ActiveMQ Artemis Core Protocol, AMT (Automatic Multicast Tunneling), Bluetooth Mesh, Broadcom tags (Broadcom Ethernet switch management frames), CAN-ETH, CVS password server, FP Mux, GRPC (gRPC), IEEE 1905.1a, IEEE 802.3br Frame Preemption Protocol, ISOBUS, LoRaTap, LoRaWAN, Lustre Filesystem, Lustre Network, Network Functional Application Platform Interface (NFAPI) Protocol, New Radio Radio Resource Control protocol, NXP 802.15.4 Sniffer Protocol, PFCP (Packet Forwarding Control Protocol), Protobuf (Protocol Buffers), QUIC (IETF), Session Multiplex Protocol, SolarEdge monitoring protocol, Tibia, TWAMP and OWAMP, and Wi-Fi Device Provisioning Protocol

2.3. Updated Protocol Support

Too many protocols have been updated to list here.

2.4. New and Updated Capture File Support

Microsoft Network Monitor

2.5. New and Updated Capture Interfaces support

LoRaTap

3. Getting Wireshark

Wireshark source code and installation packages are available from https://www.wireshark.org/download.html.

3.1. Vendor-supplied Packages

Most Linux and Unix vendors supply their own Wireshark packages. You can usually install or upgrade Wireshark using the package management system specific to that platform. A list of third-party packages can be found on the download page on the Wireshark web site.

4. File Locations

Wireshark and TShark look in several different locations for preference files, plugins, SNMP MIBS, and RADIUS dictionaries. These locations vary from platform to platform. You can use About→Folders to find the default locations on your system.

5. Known Problems

Dumpcap might not quit if Wireshark or TShark crashes. (Bug 1419)

The BER dissector might infinitely loop. (Bug 1516)

Capture filters aren’t applied when capturing from named pipes. (Bug 1814)

Filtering tshark captures with read filters (-R) no longer works. (Bug 2234)

Application crash when changing real-time option. (Bug 4035)

Wireshark and TShark will display incorrect delta times in some cases. (Bug 4985)

Wireshark should let you work with multiple capture files. (Bug 10488)

6. Getting Help

Community support is available on Wireshark’s Q&A site and on the wireshark-users mailing list. Subscription information and archives for all of Wireshark’s mailing lists can be found on the web site.

Official Wireshark training and certification are available from Wireshark University.

7. Frequently Asked Questions

A complete FAQ is available on the Wireshark web site.