CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python-3.xwiresharknetwork-monitoring
Kris Stern
Kris Stern

Reputation: 1340

How to monitor the network traffic of a Python-based package by incorporating WireShark?

I am trying to find ways to monitor the network traffic of a Python-based package. One suggested approach is by incorporating WireShark to the package. I have never done anything like this before, and could not find any tutorials on the Internet regarding this. And, whatever I could gather, it seems to be suggested using PyShark as wrapper to perform the task. Could someone please offer me some guidance such as code snippets or pointers on how I could tackle the task? Any help would be much appreciated.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 11005

Answers (1)

Kris Stern
Kris Stern

Reputation: 1340

Figured out I can probably use TShark or pyshark for my purposes to monitor the network traffic of a Python-based package. For details please see official documentation at https://www.wireshark.org/docs/man-pages/tshark.html. Can follow the sources below for what I originally wanted to do:

Update as of July 17, 2019:

So the main thing to note for me was to note that there are two methods in pyshark I could use to capture packets, namely FileCapture or LiveCapture. FileCapture is mostly for reading from a capture file, so it was not that useful for me, as I wanted to capture some live event. On the other hand, LiveCapture is for reading from a live interface, so I opted to use it for monitoring live network traffic. So I wrote the following code snippet to capture some tcp packets transmitted on my laptop:

@staticmethod
def get_packet_info(interface=None):
    """
    Returns the size of the transmitted data using Wireshark.

    Args:
        interface: A string. Name of the interface to sniff on.

    Returns: Size of the packet sent over WebSockets in a given event.
    """
    if interface is None:
        raise Exception("Please provide the interface used.")
    else:
        capture = pyshark.LiveCapture(interface=interface)
        capture.sniff(timeout=60)
        for packet in capture:
            try:
                packet_info = packet.pretty_print()
            except:
                raise Exception("Cannot determine packet info.")
        return packet_info

The argument of sniff can be changed from timeout to something like packet_count. Additionally, I could add more attributes to LiveCapture for better control.

Upvotes: 3

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