Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) using Wireshark and

Packet Tracer
LAB # 04

Statement Purpose:
Explore several aspects of the HTTP protocol: the basic GET/response interaction, HTTP
message formats, retrieving large HTML files, retrieving HTML files with embedded
objects, and HTTP authentication and security.
Activity outcomes:
Students will gain better understanding of the HTTP protocol.
1) Stage J (Journey)
Having gotten our feet wet with the Wireshark packet sniffer in the introductory lab,
we’re now ready to use Wireshark to investigate protocols in operation. In this lab, we’ll
explore several aspects of the HTTP protocol: the basic GET/response interaction, HTTP
message formats, retrieving large HTML files, retrieving HTML files with embedded
objects, and HTTP authentication and security.

2) Stage a1 (apply)
Activity 1
The Basic HTTP GET/response interaction

Let’s begin our exploration of HTTP by downloading a very simple HTML file - one that is very
short, and contains no embedded objects. Do the following:

1. Start up your web browser.

2. Start up the Wireshark packet sniffer, as described in the Introductory lab (but don’t
yet begin packet capture). Enter “http” (just the letters, not the quotation marks) in
the display-filter-specification window, so that only captured HTTP messages will be
displayed later in the packet-listing window. (We’re only interested in the HTTP
protocol here, and don’t want to see the clutter of all captured packets).
3. Wait a bit more than one minute (we’ll see why shortly), and then begin Wireshark
packet capture.
4. Enter the following to your browser
http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/HTTP-wireshark-file1.html
Your browser should display the very simple, one-line HTML file.
5. Stop Wireshark packet capture.
Your Wireshark window should look similar to the window shown in Figure 1. If you are unable
to run Wireshark on a live network connection, you can download a packet trace that was created
when the steps above were followed.1

Figure 1: Wireshark Display after http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/ HTTP-wireshark-

file1.html has been retrieved by your browser

The example in Figure 1 shows in the packet-listing window that two HTTP messages were
captured: the GET message (from your browser to the gaia.cs.umass.edu web server) and the
response message from the server to your browser. The packet-contents window shows details
of the selected message (in this case the HTTP OK message, which is highlighted in the packet-
listing window). Recall that since the HTTP message was carried inside a TCP segment, which
was carried inside an IP datagram, which was carried within an Ethernet frame, Wireshark
displays the Frame, Ethernet, IP, and TCP packet information as well. We want to minimize the
amount of non-HTTP data displayed (we’re interested in HTTP here, and will be investigating
these other protocols is later labs), so make sure the boxes at the far left of the Frame, Ethernet,
IP and TCP information have a plus sign or a right-pointing triangle (which means there is

1
Download the zip file http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/wireshark-traces.zip and extract the file http-
ethereal-trace-1. The traces in this zip file were collected by Wireshark running on one of the author’s computers,
while performing the steps indicated in the Wireshark lab. Once you have downloaded the trace, you can load it into
Wireshark and view the trace using the File pull down menu, choosing Open, and then selecting the http-ethereal-
trace-1 trace file. The resulting display should look similar to Figure 1. (The Wireshark user interface displays just a
bit differently on different operating systems, and in different versions of Wireshark).
hidden, undisplayed information), and the HTTP line has a minus sign or a down-pointing
triangle (which means that all information about the HTTP message is displayed).

By looking at the information in the HTTP GET and response messages, answer the following
questions. When answering the following questions, you should print out the GET and response
messages (see the introductory Wireshark lab for an explanation of how to do this) and indicate
where in the message you’ve found the information that answers the following questions. When
you hand in your assignment, annotate the output so that it’s clear where in the output you’re
getting the information for your answer (e.g., for our classes, we ask that students markup paper
copies with a pen, or annotate electronic copies with text in a colored font).
1. Is your browser running HTTP version 1.0 or 1.1? What version of HTTP is the server
running?
2. What languages (if any) does your browser indicate that it can accept to the server?
3. What is the IP address of your computer? Of the gaia.cs.umass.edu server?
4. What is the status code returned from the server to your browser?
5. When the HTML file that you are retrieving was last modified at the server?
6. How many bytes of content are being returned to your browser?
7. By inspecting the raw data in the packet content window, do you see any headers within
the data that are not displayed in the packet-listing window? If so, name one.

In your answer to question 5 above, you might have been surprised to find that the document you
just retrieved was last modified within a minute before you downloaded the document. That’s
because (for this particular file), the gaia.cs.umass.edu server is setting the file’s last-modified
time to be the current time, and is doing so once per minute. Thus, if you wait a minute between
accesses, the file will appear to have been recently modified, and hence your browser will
download a “new” copy of the document.

Solution:
Ans1: Both are running HTTP 1.1

Ans2: Accept-Language: en-us, en

Ans3: My IP address is 192.168.1.46 and the server’s is 128.119.245.12

Ans4: HTTP/1.1 200 OK (text/html)

Ans5: Last-Modified: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:09:01 GMT

Ans6: Content-Length: 126

Ans7: No all of the headers can be found in the raw data.

Activity 2:
The HTTP CONDITIONAL GET/response interaction
Recall from Section 2.2.6 of the text, that most web browsers perform object caching and thus perform a
conditional GET when retrieving an HTTP object. Before performing the steps below, make sure your
browser’s cache is empty. (To do this under Firefox, select Tools->Clear Recent History and check the
Cache box, or for Internet Explorer, select Tools->Internet Options->Delete File; these actions
will remove cached files from your browser’s cache.) Now do the following:
 Start up your web browser, and make sure your browser’s cache is cleared, as discussed
above.
 Start up the Wireshark packet sniffer
 Enter the following URL into your browser
http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/HTTP-wireshark-file2.html
Your browser should display a very simple five-line HTML file.
 Quickly enter the same URL into your browser again (or simply select the refresh button
on your browser)
 Stop Wireshark packet capture, and enter “http” in the display-filter-specification
window, so that only captured HTTP messages will be displayed later in the packet-
listing window.
 (Note: If you are unable to run Wireshark on a live network connection, you can use the
http-ethereal-trace-2 packet trace to answer the questions below; see footnote 1. This
trace file was gathered while performing the steps above on one of the author’s
computers.)

Answer the following questions:

8. Inspect the contents of the first HTTP GET request from your browser to the server. Do
you see an “IF-MODIFIED-SINCE” line in the HTTP GET?
9. Inspect the contents of the server response. Did the server explicitly return the contents of
the file? How can you tell?
10. Now inspect the contents of the second HTTP GET request from your browser to the
server. Do you see an “IF-MODIFIED-SINCE:” line in the HTTP GET? If so, what
information follows the “IF-MODIFIED-SINCE:” header?
11. What is the HTTP status code and phrase returned from the server in response to this
second HTTP GET? Did the server explicitly return the contents of the file? Explain.

Solution:
Ans8: No.
Ans9: Yes because we can see the contents in the Line-based text data field
Ans10: Yes. The information following is: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:29:01 GMT which is the date of the last
modification of the file from the previous get request.
Ans11: The status code and phrase returned from the server is HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified. The server
didn’t return the contents of the file since the browser loaded it from its cache.

Activity 3
Retrieving Long Documents
In our examples thus far, the documents retrieved have been simple and short HTML files. Let’s next see
what happens when we download a long HTML file. Do the following:
 Start up your web browser, and make sure your browser’s cache is cleared, as discussed above.
 Start up the Wireshark packet sniffer
 Enter the following URL into your
browserhttp://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/HTTP-wireshark-file3.html
Your browser should display the rather lengthy US Bill of Rights.
 Stop Wireshark packet capture, and enter “http” in the display-filter-specification
window, so that only captured HTTP messages will be displayed.
 (Note: If you are unable to run Wireshark on a live network connection, you can use the
http-ethereal-trace-3 packet trace to answer the questions below; see footnote 1. This
trace file was gathered while performing the steps above on one of the author’s
computers.)

In the packet-listing window, you should see your HTTP GET message, followed by a multiple-
packet TCP response to your HTTP GET request. This multiple-packet response deserves a bit
of explanation. Recall from Section 2.2 (see Figure 2.9 in the text) that the HTTP response
message consists of a status line, followed by header lines, followed by a blank line, followed by
the entity body. In the case of our HTTP GET, the entity body in the response is the entire
requested HTML file. In our case here, the HTML file is rather long, and at 4500 bytes is too
large to fit in one TCP packet. The single HTTP response message is thus broken into several
pieces by TCP, with each piece being contained within a separate TCP segment (see Figure 1.24
in the text). In recent versions of Wireshark, Wireshark indicates each TCP segment as a separate
packet, and the fact that the single HTTP response was fragmented across multiple TCP packets
is indicated by the “TCP segment of a reassembled PDU” in the Info column of the Wireshark
display. Earlier versions of Wireshark used the “Continuation” phrase to indicated that the entire
content of an HTTP message was broken across multiple TCP segments. We stress here that
there is no “Continuation” message in HTTP!
Answer the following questions:
12. How many HTTP GET request messages did your browser send? Which packet number
in the trace contains the GET message for the Bill or Rights?
13. Which packet number in the trace contains the status code and phrase associated with the
response to the HTTP GET request?
14. What is the status code and phrase in the response?
How many data-containing TCP segments were needed to carry the single HTTP response and
the text of the Bill of Rights?

Solution:
Ans12: There was 1 HTTP GET request message sent by my browser

Ans13: There were 5 data containing TCP segments containing 309 ,1452 ,1452, 1452 and 144
bytes respectively for a total of 4500 bytes.

Ans14: 200 OK
Activity 4:
HTML Documents with Embedded Objects
Now that we’ve seen how Wireshark displays the captured packet traffic for large HTML files,
we can look at what happens when your browser downloads a file with embedded objects, i.e., a
file that includes other objects (in the example below, image files) that are stored on another
server(s).

Do the following:
 Start up your web browser, and make sure your browser’s cache is cleared, as discussed
above.
 Start up the Wireshark packet sniffer
 Enter the following URL into your
browserhttp://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/HTTP-wireshark-file4.html
Your browser should display a short HTML file with two images. These two images are
referenced in the base HTML file. That is, the images themselves are not contained in
the HTML; instead the URLs for the images are contained in the downloaded HTML file.
As discussed in the textbook, your browser will have to retrieve these logos from the
indicated web sites. Our publisher’s logo is retrieved from the www.aw-bc.com web
site. The image of the cover for our 5th edition (one of our favorite covers) is stored at the
manic.cs.umass.edu server.
 Stop Wireshark packet capture, and enter “http” in the display-filter-specification
window, so that only captured HTTP messages will be displayed.
 (Note: If you are unable to run Wireshark on a live network connection, you can use the
http-ethereal-trace-4 packet trace to answer the questions below; see footnote 1. This
trace file was gathered while performing the steps above on one of the author’s
computers.)
Answer the following questions:
a. How many HTTP GET request messages did your browser send? To which
Internet addresses were these GET requests sent?
b. Can you tell whether your browser downloaded the two images serially, or
whether they were downloaded from the two web sites in parallel? Explain.

Solution:
Ans15: There were 3 HTTP GET requests sent to the following Internet addresses: a.
128.119.245.12 b. 128.119.240.90 c. 165.193.123.218
Ans16: By checking the TCP ports we can see if our files were downloaded serially or in
parallel. In this case the 2 images were transmitted over 2 TCP connections therefore they were
downloaded serially.

Activity 5 (Packet Tracer Part)

Instructions:
1. Start Packet Tracer using Realtime mode.

 Options -> Preferences

o Enable “Show Link Lights”
o Disable “Hide Device Label”
2. Configuring the www.mapua.edu Web Server

Add a server.

Global Settings:

 Change the Display Name to “Web Server: www.mapua.edu”

 Set the Gateway to 172.16.0.1
FastEthernet:

 Set the IP address to 172.16.0.20

 Set the Subnet Mask to 255.255.0.0

DHCP:

 Set the Service to Off

DNS:

 Set the Service to Off

 HTTP

 Set the both the HTTP and HTTPS Service to On

 Change the sentence, “<hr> Welcome to Cisco Packet Tracer. Opening doors to
new opportunities. Mind Wide Open.” to “<hr> Welcome to MapuaInstitute’s of
Technology’s public web page!” You may add other information as well.
Email:

 Set the SMTP Service and POP3 Service to Off

3. Configuring the www.internal.com Web Server

Add a server.

Global Settings:

 Change the Display Name to “Web Server: www.internal.com”

 Set the Gateway to 172.16.0.1
FastEthernet:

 Set the IP address to 172.16.0.30

 Set the Subnet Mask to 255.255.0.0
DHCP:

 Set the Service to Off

DNS:

 Set the Service to Off

HTTP:

 Change the sentence, “<hr> Welcome to Cisco Packet Tracer. Opening doors to
new opportunities. Mind Wide Open.” to “<hr>This is the corporate internal
network!” You may add other information as well.

1) Stage v (verify)

Activity 1:
HTTP Authentication
Finally, let’s try visiting a web site that is password-protected and examine the sequence
of HTTP message exchanged for such a site. The URL
http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/protected_pages/HTTP-wireshark-file5.html is
password protected. The username is “wireshark-students” (without the quotes), and the
password is “network” (again, without the quotes). So let’s access this “secure”
password-protected site. Do the following:
 1. Make sure your browser’s cache is cleared, as discussed above, and close down
your browser. Then, start up your browser
2. Start up the Wireshark packet sniffer
3. Enter the following URL into your browserhttp://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-
labs/protected_pages/HTTP-wireshark-file5.html
Type the requested user name and password into the pop up box.
4. Stop Wireshark packet capture, and enter “http” in the display-filter-specification
window, so that only captured HTTP messages will be displayed later in the
packet-listing window.
5. (Note: If you are unable to run Wireshark on a live network connection, you can
use the http-ethereal-trace-5 packet trace to answer the questions below; see
footnote 2. This trace file was gathered while performing the steps above on one
of the author’s computers.)
Now let’s examine the Wireshark output. You might want to first read up on HTTP
authentication by reviewing the easy-to-read material on “HTTP Access Authentication
Framework” at http://frontier.userland.com/stories/storyReader$2159
Answer the following questions:
i. What is the server’s response (status code and phrase) in response to the
initial HTTP GET message from your browser?
ii. When your browser’s sends the HTTP GET message for the second time,
what new field is included in the HTTP GET message?

The username (wireshark-students) and password (network) that you entered are encoded
in the string of characters (d2lyZXNoYXJrLXN0dWRlbnRzOm5ldHdvcms=) following
the “Authorization: Basic” header in the client’s HTTP GET message. While it may
appear that your username and password are encrypted, they are simply encoded in a
format known as Base64 format. The username and password are notencrypted! To see
this, go to http://www.motobit.com/util/base64-decoder-encoder.asp and enter the
base64-encoded string d2lyZXNoYXJrLXN0dWRlbnRz and decode. Voila! You have
translated from Base64 encoding to ASCII encoding, and thus should see your username!
To view the password, enter the remainder of the string Om5ldHdvcms= and press
decode. Since anyone can download a tool like Wireshark and sniff packets (not just
their own) passing by their network adaptor, and anyone can translate from Base64 to
ASCII (you just did it!), it should be clear to you that simple passwords on WWW sites
are not secure unless additional measures are taken.
4) Stage a1 (assess)
Assignment#1
Provide web services in the said topology using this information:
1) Set the server ip into “192.168.78.1”
2) Set the DNS “Name” into whatever you wish, mine is “http://www.hesemeleh.com