TCP/IP Network Traffic Analysis with Wireshark Training Course

Day 1

Overview of Network Analysis

1. Essentials of the OSI Reference Model and TCP/IP networks.
2. Troubleshooting tools and methodologies.
3. Introduction to Wireshark
4. What is Wireshark? Portable Wireshark options and resources.
5. Wireshark GUI structure: Panes (Packet List, Details, Packet Bytes), Status Bar, etc.
6. Architecture and processing flow. Understanding what cannot be seen with Wireshark and why.
7. Supported protocols and dissectors.
8. Preferences and configurations: global and profile-specific settings.
9. Time values and handling.
10. Lab exercises.

Day 2

Capturing Traffic

1. Key considerations before starting a capture.
2. Promiscuous mode.
3. Capture filters.
4. Automatic stop criteria.
5. Remote capture techniques.
6. Lab exercises.

Traffic Analysis: Tools and Approaches

1. Analysis checklist.
2. Utilizing features: name resolution, colorization, marking, ignoring, commenting, time references, time shifts, etc.
3. Understanding the Expert System.
4. Accessing options via Right-Click functionality.
5. Interpretation (reference patterns) and the impact of OS/driver Offload features.
6. Saving results.
7. Lab exercises and case studies.

Day 3

Traffic Analysis: Tools and Approaches (Continued)

1. Filtering traffic: Display filters (preparing "in-flight" filters, macros), following streams.
2. Quantitative analysis.
   1. Basic predefined descriptive statistics and summaries: Capture Properties, Protocol Hierarchy, Conversations, Endpoints, Packet Lengths, IP-specific data.
   2. Protocol-specific analysis (e.g., TCP Stream Graphs).
   3. Advanced custom statistics using I/O Graph.
   4. Flow visualization.

Day 4

Traffic Analysis: Protocols

1. Data-Link Layer: Ethernet II.
2. Network Layer: IPv4.
3. Transport Layer: TCP, UDP.
   1. Packet loss and recovery mechanisms.
   2. Events related to lost previous segments and out-of-order segments.
   3. Duplicate ACKs and Fast Retransmissions.
   4. TCP Retransmissions.
   5. Zero Window, Window changes, and other window-related issues.
4. Application Layer: HTTP, FTP.
5. Lab exercises and case studies.

Day 5

Traffic Analysis: Common Issues in Network Performance Assessment

1. Causes of performance problems.
2. Packet loss.
3. Bandwidth issues: A layered approach to measurement.
4. Latency: Assessing end-to-end latency and visualization.
5. Lab exercises.
6. Wireshark command-line tools:
   1. tshark (terminal-based Wireshark), dumpcap, rawshark, tcpdump
   2. editcap, mergecap, capinfos, text2pcap.

Advanced Topics

1. Advanced filters, grouped IO statistics.
2. Summary and Q&A.