The
binary wire format
of Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) messages are not self-described protocol. For
example, the varint wire type in protobuf packet may be converted to int32, int64,
uint32, uint64, sint32, sint64, bool or enum field types of
protocol buffers language.
Wireshark should be configured with Protocol Buffers language files (*.proto) to
enable proper dissection of protobuf data (which may be payload of
gRPC) based on the message, enum and field definitions.
You can specify protobuf search paths at the Protobuf protocol preferences.
For example, if you defined a proto file with path d:/my_proto_files/helloworld.proto
and the helloworld.proto contains a line of import "google/protobuf/any.proto";
because the any type of official protobuf library is used. And the real path of
any.proto is d:/protobuf-3.4.1/include/google/protobuf/any.proto. You should
add the d:/protobuf-3.4.1/include/ and d:/my_proto_files paths into protobuf
search paths.
The configuration for the protobuf search paths is a user table, as described in Section 11.7, “User Table”, with the following fields:
d:/protobuf-3.4.1/include/ and d:/my_proto_files in Windows, or
/usr/include/ and /home/alice/my_proto_files in Linux/UNIX.
d:/protobuf-3.4.1/include/) should not be set to load all
files, that may cause unnecessary memory use.