NDN Packet Dissector for Wireshark

NDN packet dissector requires at least version 1.12.6 of Wireshark with LUA support enabled

The dissection of Named Data Networking (NDN) packets is supported in the following cases:

NDN packets are encapsulated in IPv4/IPv6 UDP packets with source or destination port 6363 or 56363.
NDN packets are encapsulated in IPv4/IPv6 TCP segments with source or destination port 6363.
NDN packets are encapsulated in IPv4/IPv6 TCP/HTTP WebSocket packets with source or destination port 9696.

Available dissection features

When UDP packet is fragmented, the dissection is performed after the full IP reassembly. If the full reassembly is not possible (e.g., a wrong checksum or missing segments), dissection is not performed.
When multiple NDN packets are part of a single UDP datagram, TCP segment, or WebSocket payload, all NDN packets are dissected.
When a single NDN packet is scattered across multiple TCP segments or WebSocket payloads, it is dissected after the successful reconstruction of the necessary portion of the TCP stream. If the reconstruction of the necessary portion of the TCP stream is not possible (e.g., missing segments), the dissection is not performed.

When an NDN packet is not aligned to the segment or payload boundary, the dissector searches for any valid NDN packet within the segment using heuristics defined by the following pseudocode:

  for each offset in range (0, packet length)
    type <- read TLV VarNumber from (buffer + offset)
    length <- read TLV VarNumber from (buffer + offset + length of type field)

    if type is either 5 or 6  // Type of NDN Interest of Data packet)
       and length is less 8800 // Current (soft) limit for NDN packet size
    then
       dissect NDN packet from (buffer + offset)
    end if

Currently, the dissector does not support NDNLPv2 packets.

Usage

By default, the dissector script ndn.lua is installed into /usr/local/share/ndn-dissect-wireshark. On some platforms, it may also be installed in /usr/share/ndn-dissect-wireshark or /opt/local/share/ndn-dissect-wireshark. To enable the dissector for Wireshark session, use -X command line option, specifying the full path to the ndn.lua script:

wireshark -X lua_script:/usr/local/share/ndn-dissect-wireshark/ndn.lua

Similarly, NDN packets dissector can be enabled when using tshark:

tshark shark -X lua_script:/usr/local/share/ndn-dissect-wireshark/ndn.lua

To enable NDN packets dissector for all future Wireshark sessions, you can create/edit Wireshark's init.lua script, which located in /usr/share/wireshark, /usr/local/share/wireshark, /Applications/Wireshark.app/Contents/Resources/share/wireshark, or similar location depending on the platform and the way Wireshark is installed. The dofile command should be added to the end of init.lua file:

-- dofile("/full/path/to/ndn.lua")
dofile("/usr/local/share/ndn-dissect-wireshark/ndn.lua")

For more detailed information about how to use Lua refer to Lua wiki.

Known issues

Due to security issues, customized lua scripts are not allowed to be loaded when Wireshark is started with root privileges. There are two workarounds:

run Wireshark, dumpcap, or tcpdump with root privileges to capture traffic to a file, later running Wireshark without root privileges and to analyze the captured traffic.
(beware of potential security implications) allow non-root users to capture packets:
- On Linux platform, you can use setcap
```
  sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /full/path/to/wireshark
```
  You may need to install a package to use setcap (e.g., sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin on Ubuntu)
- On Debian/Ubuntu Linux, capturing traffic with Wireshark by a non-root user can be enabled by adding this user to the wireshark group.
  See Wireshark Debian README for more details.
- On OSX platform, /dev/bpf* devices need to be assigned proper permissions
  Automatically using ChmodBPF app
```
curl https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=3373 -o ChmodBPF.tar.gz
tar zxvf ChmodBPF.tar.gz
open ChmodBPF/Install\ ChmodBPF.app
```
  or manually:
```
sudo chgrp admin /dev/bpf*
sudo chmod g+rw /dev/bpf*
```