What is Wireshark?

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

What’s New

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

Support for a number of legacy features and libraries has been removed. See the “Removed Features and Support” section below for more details.

Bug Fixes

The following bugs have been fixed:

  • Data following a TCP ZeroWindowProbe is marked as retransmission and not passed to subdissectors (Bug 15427)

  • Lua Error on startup: init.lua: dofile has been disabled due to running Wireshark as superuser (Bug 15489).

Text and Image columns were handled incorrectly for TDS 7.0 and 7.1. (Bug 3098)

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

New and Updated Features

The following features are new (or have been significantly updated) since version 3.0.0rc2:

  • No significant changes.

The following features are new (or have been significantly updated) since version 3.0.0rc1:

  • The IP map feature (the “Map” button in the “Endpoints” dialog) has been added back in a modernized form (Bug 14693).

  • The macOS package now ships with Qt 5.12.1. Previously it shipped with Qt 5.9.7.

  • The macOS package requires version 10.12 or later. If you’re running an older version of macOS, please use Wireshark 2.6.

The following features are new (or have been significantly updated) since version 2.9.0:

  • Wireshark now supports the Swedish and Ukrainian languages.

  • Initial support for using PKCS #11 tokens for RSA decryption in TLS. This can be configured at Preferences, RSA Keys.

  • The build system now produces reproducible builds (Bug 15163).

  • The Windows installers now ship with Qt 5.12.1. Previously they shipped with Qt 5.12.0.

The following features are new (or have been significantly updated) since version 2.6.0:

  • The Windows .exe installers now ship with Npcap instead of WinPcap. Besides being actively maintained (by the nmap project), Npcap brings support for loopback capture and 802.11 WiFi monitor mode capture (if supported by the NIC driver).

  • Conversation timestamps are supported for UDP/UDP-Lite protocols

  • TShark now supports the -G elastic-mapping option which generates an ElasticSearch mapping file.

  • The “Capture Information” dialog has been added back (Bug 12004).

  • The Ethernet and IEEE 802.11 dissectors no longer validate the frame check sequence (checksum) by default.

  • The TCP dissector gained a new “Reassemble out-of-order segments” preference to fix dissection and decryption issues in case TCP segments are received out-of-order. See the User’s Guide, chapter TCP Reassembly for details.

  • Decryption support for the new WireGuard dissector (Bug 15011, requires Libgcrypt 1.8).

  • The BOOTP dissector has been renamed to DHCP. With the exception of “bootp.dhcp”, the old “bootp.*” display filter fields are still supported but may be removed in a future release.

  • The SSL dissector has been renamed to TLS. As with BOOTP the old “ssl.*” display filter fields are supported but may be removed in a future release.

  • Coloring rules, IO graphs, Filter Buttons and protocol preference tables can now be copied from other profiles using a button in the corresponding configuration dialogs.

  • APT-X has been renamed to aptX.

  • When importing from hex dump, it’s now possible to add an ExportPDU header with a payload name. This calls the specific dissector directly without lower protocols.

  • The sshdump and ciscodump extcap interfaces can now use a proxy for the SSH connection.

  • Dumpcap now supports the -a packets:NUM and -b packets:NUM options.

  • Wireshark now includes a “No Reassembly” configuration profile.

  • Wireshark now supports the Russian language.

  • The build system now supports AppImage packages.

  • The Windows installers now ship with Qt 5.12.0. Previously they shipped with Qt 5.9.7.

  • Support for DTLS and TLS decryption using pcapng files that embed a Decryption Secrets Block (DSB) containing a TLS Key Log (Bug 15252).

  • The editcap utility gained a new --inject-secrets option to inject an existing TLS Key Log file into a pcapng file.

  • A new dfilter function string() has been added. It allows the conversion of non-string fields to strings so string functions (as contains and matches) can be used on them.

  • The Bash test suite has been replaced by one based on Python unittest/pytest.

  • The custom window title can now show file path of the capture file and it has a conditional separator.

Removed Features and Support

  • The legacy (GTK+) user interface has been removed and is no longer supported.

  • The portaudio library is no longer needed due to the removal of GTK+.

  • Wireshark requires Qt 5.2 or later. Qt 4 is no longer supported.

  • Wireshark requires GLib 2.32 or later.

  • Wireshark requires GnuTLS 3.2 or later as optional dependency.

  • Building Wireshark requires Python 3.4 or newer, Python 2.7 is unsupported.

  • Building Wireshark requires CMake. Autotools is no longer supported.

  • TShark’s -z compare option was removed.

  • Building with Cygwin is no longer supported on Windows.

New File Format Decoding Support

Ruby Marshal format

New Protocol Support

Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), Basic Transport Protocol (BTP), BLIP Couchbase Mobile (BLIP), CDMA 2000, Circuit Emulation Service over Ethernet (CESoETH), Cisco Meraki Discovery Protocol (MDP), Distributed Ruby (DRb), DXL, E1AP (5G), EVS (3GPP TS 26.445 A.2 EVS RTP), Exablaze trailers, General Circuit Services Notification Application Protocol (GCSNA), GeoNetworking (GeoNw), GLOW Lawo Emberplus Data format, Great Britain Companion Specification (GBCS) used in the Smart Metering Equipment Technical Specifications (SMETS), GSM-R (User-to-User Information Element usage), HI3CCLinkData, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) application level, ISO 13400-2 Diagnostic communication over Internet Protocol (DoIP), ITU-t X.696 Octet Encoding Rules (OER), Local Number Portability Database Query Protocol (ANSI), MsgPack, NGAP (5G), NR (5G) PDCP, Osmocom Generic Subscriber Update Protocol (GSUP), PCOM protocol, PKCS#10 (RFC2986 Certification Request Syntax), PROXY (v2), S101 Lawo Emberplus transport frame, Secure Reliable Transport Protocol (SRT), Spirent Test Center Signature decoding for Ethernet and FibreChannel (STCSIG, disabled by default), Sybase-specific portions of TDS, systemd Journal Export, TeamSpeak 3 DNS, TPM 2.0, Ubiquiti Discovery Protocol (UBDP), WireGuard, XnAP (5G), and Z39.50 Information Retrieval Protocol

Updated Protocol Support

Too many protocols have been updated to list here.

New and Updated Capture File Support

RFC 7468 (PEM), Ruby marshal object files, systemd Journal Export, and Unigraf DPA-400 DisplayPort AUX channel monitor

New and Updated Capture Interfaces support

dpauxmon, an external capture interface (extcap) that captures DisplayPort AUX channel data from linux kernel drivers.

sdjournal, an extcap that captures systemd journal entries.

Major API Changes

  • Lua: the various logging functions (debug, info, message, warn and critical) have been removed. Use the print function instead for debugging purposes.

  • Lua: on Windows, file-related functions such as dofile now assume UTF-8 paths instead of the local code page. This is consistent with Linux and macOS and improves compatibility on non-English systems. (Bug 15118)

Getting Wireshark

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

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.

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.

Getting Help

The User’s Guide, manual pages and various other documentation can be found at https://www.wireshark.org/docs/

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.

Bugs and feature requests can be reported on the bug tracker.

Official Wireshark training and certification are available from Wireshark University.

Frequently Asked Questions

A complete FAQ is available on the Wireshark web site.

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