What wishpy is?

• Uses cffi to generate Python bindings for wireshark and libpcap

• You can write applications like tshark in Python

• Makes wireshark’s dissectors available in Python and makes libpcap easily available in Python for packet capture

• This is in active development, but should work on common Linux distributions, if it doesn’t please file an issue.

• Also,a drop-in replacement for pcapy. Supports all the major pcapy APIs.

• Early Windows support. Please check README-windows .

Getting Started

This packages right now is tested only on Linux (specifically Ubuntu 16.04) To be able to get started, following development environment is required -

1. gcc and it’s toolset

2. Python 3.5 or higher and Python development environment.

3. Supports PyPy 7.3 or higher (compatible with Python 3.6)

It is highly recommended to start with a virtual environment, something like virtualenv venv

Typically simply doing a python setup.py install should be enough to get you started. If everything goes well, one will have the modules installed in the site-packages.

Once the packages are installed, you can run the example code -

Alternatively, if you just want to use wrapped APIs, they are used in - 1. wishpy/scripts/tcpdump.py <interface_name> (For live capturing the packets and dumping json, NOTE: Requires sudo permissions.) 2. wishpy/scripts/tshark.py <pcap-file-path> (For dumping packets from a pcap``ish file as ``json)

Wireshark support

Right now both Wireshark 2.6.x and wireshark 3.2.x are supported.

The best way to make sure this works is through pkg-config. Right now, default support is for wireshark 2.6 that ships with Ubuntu. If you have both the versions installed, it’s a little bit tricky. If building wireshark from source, If you perform a make install (or sudo make install), the right wireshark.pc file is created and will be used during build.

libpcap support

libpcap library > 1.7 is supported. Also, there is a pcapy module, that can be used as a drop in replacement for pcapy. Similar APIs as pcapy are supported. We have performed quick testing with following versions of libpcap on Ubuntu (based on git tag) - libpcap-1.7.4, libpcap-1.8.1, libpcap-1.9.1.

Documentation

We have started with some very ‘basic’ Dissector/Capturer API. See wishpy/scripts/tshark.py to see how it can be used. This API is very early (in fact this is not really an API, but just a hint about what API might look like.) and very likely to change going forward. A very early version of the API Documentation is available.

Examples

See the code in wishpy/scripts/ directory for how to use wishpy API.

A More detailed example using wishpy for publishing to Redis is available at the following repo -

• wishpy-examples