Show HN: Stratoshark, a sibling application to Wireshark

230 points
1/21/1970
11 hours ago
by geraldcombs

Comments


clbrmbr

Wireshark is to tcpdump as stratoshark is to strace.

Did I get the analogy right?

7 hours ago

geraldcombs

Pretty much. It's part of the same ecosystem as Sysdig OSS[1], which works much like strace. It uses the same underlying libraries as sysdig and Falco, and you can move capture files between them.

It'd be interesting to see if we can integrate more fully with strace as well, but that might require updating strace itself.

[1]https://github.com/draios/sysdig

7 hours ago

IshKebab

Why is it talking about clouds and stratospheres then? strace is pretty far from "the cloud" isn't it?

6 hours ago

uhei

With the falco plugins [1] a broad range of "cloud native" services can be captured in Stratoshark. At the moment we have AWS cloudtrail and GCP Audit included in the macOS and Win installers.

[1] https://github.com/falcosecurity/plugins?tab=readme-ov-file#...

5 hours ago

freedomben

Long, long time user of Wireshark and I instantly recognize your name. Thank you for all the great work over the years :-)

Looks really awesome! I didn't see Linux installation instructions so clicked on the link to the source code, but it links to the Wireshark source[1]. Is Stratoshark part of the same repo as Wireshark? Is Linux supported by Stratoshark?

[1]: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark

9 hours ago

geraldcombs

Thanks! It's part of the same code base (and therefore open source), and Linux is definitely supported. It adds libscap and libsinsp as dependencies, and you can find basic build instructions at https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/blob/master/doc/str....

9 hours ago

observationist

The OP URL has been flagged as grayware by Palo Alto and is thus inaccessible to a large number of people, possibly indicating typosquatting, or being miscategorized?

https://wiki.wireshark.org/Stratoshark is a good link for those who can't reach the stratoshark URL directly. The OP link may get recategorized and become accessible in the meantime.

8 hours ago

geraldcombs

Well, crap. The domain and site are still fairly new, so maybe that's the issue? Is there anyone here from Palo Alto that can take a look?

8 hours ago

observationist

Going through their URL filtering site and requesting a recategorization is the best option for now, unless someone from the company sees it.

https://urlfiltering.paloaltonetworks.com/

6 hours ago

geraldcombs

Done. We've been upgraded from medium-risk "grayware" to low-risk "generally do not contain content that is useful to the end user" which is technically better, I suppose.

Update: We're now Low-Risk / Computer-and-Internet-Info.

5 hours ago

pimlottc

The first section on the homepage doesn’t give me a good sense of what the application does. The references to Wireshark suggest it has something to do with network traffic but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It also talks about cloud but nothing seems to be cloud-specific?

8 hours ago

geraldcombs

Thanks for the feedback! I'll see if we can make the top of the site more descriptive.

Update: Changed the first sentence to "Stratoshark lets you explore and analyze applications at the system call level using a mature, proven interface based on Wireshark.

8 hours ago

sesm

So, DTrace with Wireshark UI?

7 hours ago

geraldcombs

We don't share any code with DTrace, but it's not a bad analogy. As with my other reply about strace, it'd be interesting to see if we can more closely integrate Stratoshark, strace, and DTrace in the same way that Wireshark integrates with tcpdump.

7 hours ago

gertrunde

The blog article is a bit more descriptive : https://sysdig.com/blog/stratoshark-extending-wiresharks-leg...

tl;dr version: system calls, but in the wireshark ui. (I've probably oversimplified that!)

8 hours ago

vasco

Thanks for your work! Been using Wireshark for many years after it was used for a network course in university.

Why do you focus on "what happens in your cloud" when we talk about system calls? It'd seem it's useful for any machine, is it just bad marketing copy or am I missing something?

8 hours ago

geraldcombs

You're welcome! It was initially developed as part of my day job at Sysdig, a cloud security company. The initial feature set and use cases focus on getting .scaps (system call and log captures) from cloud environments, but you're entirely correct -- this has much more general applications including troubleshooting and education just like Wireshark does on the networking side.

7 hours ago

kristopolous

Hey Gerald, It's Chris from the CACE days. Nice to hear from you. I see this is part of wireshark proper, I'll look into getting this into debian

7 hours ago

vasco

Thanks for confirming and thanks again for the amazing work.

7 hours ago

thesuitonym

Would I be right in assuming this is like Sysinternals procmon but with a better interface and for Linux?

6 hours ago

geraldcombs

The tools are similar in many ways, but Stratoshark shares Wireshark's dissection, filtering, and UI code, which provides a more low-level details and a free-form filtering language. Stratoshark is currently limited to capture on Linux (we're hoping to expand to macOS and Windows in the future) and the UI runs on all three platforms. There's an enhancement request[1] to add Procmon file support but I haven't had a chance to investigate what that might require.

[1]https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues/20317

5 hours ago

knowitnone

yet there is a windows installer?

4 hours ago

danparsonson

Capture on Linux, analyse on Windows

3 hours ago

RachelF

OK, that makes more sense.

9 minutes ago

tarasglek

It is not clear what the architecture for system-call capture is. Is it ptrace, ebpf or some custom thing or some combo? What is the overhead of running this?

The tool looks really cool, hopefully it moves ui state of art beyond windows xperf

6 hours ago

geraldcombs

It uses Falco libs[1] underneath, which supports capture using eBPF or a kmod. I work with the Falco libs team and they go to great lengths to minimize overhead.

[1]https://github.com/falcosecurity/libs/

6 hours ago

mdaniel

clickable link: https://stratoshark.org

I found its man page in the repo which I found insightful https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/blob/ssv0.9.0/doc/m...

and don't overlook this neato thing: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/blob/ssv0.9.0/doc/m...

11 hours ago

n1g3ld0uglas2

Being able to use Wireshark in Kubernetes is super exciting. I can't wait to get started!

11 hours ago

imcritic

Can this program do more than just observe and trace what happens?

Can one use it to set up some rule to suppress some of the syscalls sent to a specific process? Or alter them by some logic on the go?

8 hours ago

geraldcombs

It's currently only passive, but that'd be an interesting feature. In order for that to happen we'd have to add that functionality to https://github.com/falcosecurity/libs/ along with the necessary plumbing in the UI.

8 hours ago

brutopia

How does it trace syscalls on macos? Do you need to disable SIP?

7 hours ago

geraldcombs

Right now the UI runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux but you can only capture system calls on Linux via Falco libs[1]. Expanding local capture to include macOS and Windows is definitely something we'd love to do!

[1]https://github.com/falcosecurity/libs

6 hours ago

nikisweeting

Awesome! Thanks for your work on this and everything else.

Once you add capture on macOS with something like dtrace, could you concievably capture a system call inside Docker on macOS and watch it trickle down through the linux hypervisor and then to the host darwin kernel and back?

How does it conceptually track the handoff of system calls between hypervisors/VMs/containers/etc?

5 hours ago

geraldcombs

In this case you would presumably have a capture file that contained syscall events at both the macOS boundary and at the Linux VM boundary. At the present time it would be like capturing traffic on either side of a firewall and loading it into Wireshark (which is something people do!) You'd have to correlate the events visually/manually but adding an automatic correlation feature is well within the realm of possibility.

4 hours ago

zokier

Does sysdig (and stratoshark by extension) still require custom out-of-tree kernel module to function?

6 hours ago

uhei

No, with the parameter '--modern-bpf' you can use eBPF. So, no kmod required any more.

5 hours ago

napolux

having used wireshark since i was a kid... this looks really promising

11 hours ago

Chihuahua0633

Do you have any wildly good Wireshark resources to reference -- I know I'm barely scratching the surface.

9 hours ago

12bits

https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisGreer if you are into video format.

9 hours ago

westurner

Re: custom fields in pcap traces and retis https://github.com/retis-org/retis

11 hours ago