Protocol coverage metrics

March 22, 2009 by kowsik

If all you have is a pcap with some protocol packets in it, how would you know how much of the actual protocol specification (the possible set of fields that the packets could carry) is being covered? This is a useful metric to have when writing a dissector or IPS/DPI signatures. This is much in the spirit of code coverage.

We used the Wireshark dissector documentation as the authoritative reference and then indexed all the protocol fields in the repository to see where we stand. You can check it out here.

The math for the coverage is pretty simple. Divide the pcaps that have a certain number of fields for a given protocol against the number of fields that Wireshark has. Besides, the index makes searching for pcaps with specific fields a whole lot easier. Looking for a SIP pcap that contains the WWW-Authenticate header? No problem, just type in “field:sip.www.authenticate” in the search bar and off you go. How about chunked-encoded HTTP stream with exploit.php? Search for “field:http.transfer.encoding AND exploit.php“.

Categories: pcapr
1,148 Comments
Bookmark and Share