I am using the WHOIS client a lot these days since I am migrating some RIPE objects such as ASes, inetnum/inet6num, etc. Meanwhile, I recognized that I have never captured this TCP port 43 protocol, nor looked at it with Wireshark. That’s what this post is all about, incl. a downloadable pcap for your own analysis.
VoIP calls, using the network protocols SIP/SDP and RTP, are the de-facto standard when it comes to voice calls. Wireshark offers some special features to analyze those calls and RTP streams – even with a nice “Play Streams” option, which discretely decodes your calls. Ouch. Again and again, frightening which privacy-related protocols are completely unencrypted on the Internet!
Here are some hints for Wireshark as well as a downloadable pcap with three calls in there. ;) Have fun!
Some time ago I published a post called DNS Test Names & Resource Records which lists many different FQDNs with lots of different RRs. You can use those public available DNS names to test your DNS servers or the like. However, I was missing a packet capture showing all these resource records as they appear on the wire. So now, here it is. If you are searching for some packets to test your tools for whatever reason, feel free to download this pcap.
As you might have noticed, I am playing a lot with NTP these days. Having a networking background I also like Power over Ethernet. So what’s more obvious than using a PoE-powered NTP display for test purposes? ;D
This is a guest blogpost by Martin Langer, Ph.D. student for “Secured Time Synchronization Using Packet-Based Time Protocols” at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
In the previous posts, I already introduced the Network Time Security (NTS) protocol and described the most important features. Although the specification process has not been completed, there are already some independent NTS implementations and public time servers (IETF106). NTPsec is one of the important representatives of this series and already offers an advanced NTS solution. In this post, I’ll give you a short guide to setting up an NTS-secured NTP client/server with NTPsec.
I am currently working on a network & security training, module “OSI Layer 4 – Transport”. Therefore I made a very basic demo of a TCP and UDP connection in order to see the common “SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK” for TCP while none of them for UDP, “Follow TCP/UDP Stream” in Wireshark, and so on. I wanted to show that it’s not that complicated at all. Every common application/service simply uses these data streams to transfer data aka bytes between a client and a server.
That is: Here are the Linux commands for basic lab, a downloadable pcap, and, as always, some Wireshark screenshots:
Continue reading Basic TCP and UDP Demos w/ netcat and telnet
During my analysis of NTP and its traffic to my NTP servers listed in the NTP Pool Project I discovered many ICMP error messages coming back to my servers such as port unreachables, address unreachables, time exceeded or administratively prohibited. Strange. In summary, more than 3 % of IPv6-enabled NTP clients failed in getting answers from my servers. Let’s have a closer look:
Continue reading Incorrect Working IPv6 NTP Clients/Networks
This is a guest blogpost by Jasper Bongertz. His own blog is at blog.packet-foo.com.
Running your own NTP server(s) is usually a good idea. Even better if you know that they’re working correctly and serve their answers efficiently and without a significant delay, even under load. This is how you can use Wireshark to analyze the NTP delta time for NTP servers:
It’s not always this simple DNS thing such as “single query – single answer, both via UDP”. Sometimes you have some more options or bigger messages that look and behave differently on the network. For example: IP fragmentation for larger DNS answers that do not fit into a single UDP datagram (hopefully not after the DNS flag day 2020 anymore), or DNS via TCP, or some newer options within the EDNS space such as “EDNS Client Subnet” (ECS) or DNS cookies.
I won’t explain any details about those options, but I am publishing a pcap with that kind of packets along with some Wireshark screenshots. Feel free to dig into it.
Continue reading DNS Capture: UDP, TCP, IP-Fragmentation, EDNS, ECS, Cookie
Since my last blogposts covered many 6in4 IPv6 tunnel setups (1, 2, 3) I took a packet capture of some tunneled IPv6 sessions to get an idea how these packets look like on the wire. Feel free to download this small pcap and to have a look at it by yourself.
A couple of spontaneous challenges from the pcap round things up. ;)
When configuring a pool of NTP servers on a F5 BIG-IP load balancer you need to choose how to check if they are still up and running. There is no specific NTP monitor on a F5 BIG-IP that does an application layer health check (like there is for http or radius). The out-of-the-box options that can be used are only ICMP and UDP monitoring. Let’s first look at the pros and cons of using either (or both) of these monitors. Then let’s build a custom UDP monitor that does a better job at checking whether the NTP servers are still healthy.
Continue reading F5 BIG-IP Application Level NTP Health Checks
What’s the first step in a networker’s life if he wants to work with an unknown protocol: he captures and wiresharks it. ;) Following is a downloadable pcap in which I am showing the most common NTP packets such as basic client-server messages, as well as control and authenticated packets. I am also showing how to analyze the delta time with Wireshark, that is: how long an NTP server needs to respond to a request.
Continue reading Packet Capture: Network Time Protocol (NTP)
I was interested in how a recursive DNS server resolves DNS queries in detail. That is, not only the mere AAAA or A record, but also DNSSEC keys and signatures, the authority and additional section when testing with dig , and so on. For this I made two simple DNS queries to my recursive DNS server which resulted in more than 100 DNS packets at all. Wow.
In the following I am publishing a downloadable pcap so that you can analyse it by yourself. Furthermore I am showing some listings and screenshots to get an idea of the DNS resolution process.
I got an email where someone asked whether I know how to change the link-local IPv6 addresses on a FortiGate similar to any other network/firewall devices. He could not find anything about this on the Fortinet documentation nor on Google.
Well, I could not find anything either. What’s up? It’s not new to me that you cannot really configure IPv6 on the FortiGate GUI, but even on the CLI I couldn’t find anything about changing this link-local IPv6 address from the default EUI-64 based one to a manually assigned one. Hence I opened a ticket at Fortinet. It turned out that you cannot *change* this address at all, but that you must *add* another LL address which will be used for the router advertisements (RA) after a reboot (!) of the firewall. Stupid design!
Continue reading Trying to change an IPv6 Link-Local Address on a FortiGate
I did a session at SharkFest’18 Europe in Vienna with the title of “Crash Course: IPv6 and Network Protocols“. Since the presentation slides + audio were recorded you can listen to the talk, too. Here are some notes about the motivation for this session as well as feedback from the attendees.
Continue reading SharkFest’18 Europe: Crash Course: IPv6 and Network Protocols