SCTP Windows in Wireshark

With the growth of digital platforms, rise in malicious activities has been increased to target unsecure or less secure platforms for different purposes like identity theft, stealing personal data for psychographic profiles etc. Hence, security becomes the priority of all the digital platforms and to ensure proper security different tools are used and Wireshark is one of them. It is a network analyzer which captures data packets and gives a clear idea of network security and vulnerabilities which can be dealt with to make the network secure.

SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is a network protocol which works on transport layer for call signaling. It can be understood as next level of TCP because it overcomes all the problems of TCP and UDP. It is used to send multiple streams of data among devices. Telephonic conversations can be easily done using SCTP. It can send additional data along with voice data at the same time, so it works as full duplex. SCTP was developed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for managing multimedia data transfer.

Properties of SCTP:

• It is a connection oriented protocol which transfers data from one end to another using different routing paths.
• Corrupted or damaged data packets can be detected using SACK and checksums.
• It does not depend on IP layer for pliancy.
• Reordering of data can be achieved more efficiently as compared to TCP

SCTP Windows in Wireshark:

It is a data packet analyzing window which provides detailed information about SCTP data packets. Any telephonic or multimedia data transfer can be sniffed and data packets with SCTP and MEGACO protocol are separated in SCTP windows for detailed analysis. It can be found under the Telephony tab in Wireshark, see the below image.

SCTP allows analyzing data packets as a single one or all together using two options which are Analyze this Association and Show All Associations.

1. Analyze this Association: It is used to analyze a single packet and gives information about different fields like checksum used to identify corrupt or defected packets. Data bytes sent from one endpoint to another. Data chucks sent across two endpoints etc.

2. Show All Association: It provides overall information about data packets transmitted across two endpoints. It tells about the port numbers, number of data packets used in the communication, number of data chunks used and total number of bytes.

See the below image for captured data.

Conclusion:

It can be concluded that SCTP is a better protocol as compared to TCP and UDP as it can be used for voice as well as multimedia data. Wireshark can easily interpret IP address of endpoints and other information like bytes of data transferred along with port number.