Computer Networks Assignment #2

NTUT, 112-1 Semester

I. Assignment Description:
(1) Install the Wireshark software (https://www.wireshark.org) first. Use the
Wireshark software and follow the instructions in the “Wireshark Lab: HTTP v8.0”
attached to complete the 19 questions in this lab.
(2) Complete your assignment and turn-in online to NTUT iSchool Plus (北科 i 學園)
in pdf file format.
(3) Make sure to include your student id. to the name of the file you turn-in (e.g.,
111310000_Computer Networks_Asgmt2.pdf)
(4) The due date for this assignment: Oct. 26, 2023, Thurs., 20:00
(5) The required format for turning-in your assignment is described in section III.

II. Wireshark Lab: HTTP v8.0

Wireshark Lab: HTTP v8.0

Supplement to Computer Networking: A Top-
Down Approach, 8th ed., J.F. Kurose and K.W.
Ross

“Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve

me and I understand.” Chinese proverb

© 2005-2020, J.F Kurose and K.W. Ross, All Rights

Reserved

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. Before beginning
these labs, you might want to review Section 2.2 of the text.1

1. The Basic HTTP GET/response interaction

1
References to figures and sections are for the 8 th edition of our text, Computer Networks, A Top-down
Approach, 8h ed., J.F. Kurose and K.W. Ross, Addison-Wesley/Pearson, 2020.
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.2

2
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).
 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 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).

(Note: You should ignore any HTTP GET and response for favicon.ico. If you see a reference
to this file, it is your browser automatically asking the server if it (the server) has a small icon
file that should be displayed next to the displayed URL in your browser. We’ll ignore
references to this pesky file in this lab.).

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? What is the IP address of the
gaia.cs.umass.edu server?
4. What is the status code returned from the server to your browser?
5. When was the HTML file that you are retrieving 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.

2. The HTTP CONDITIONAL GET/response interaction

Recall from Section 2.2.5 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.

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 browser
http://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?
15. How many data-containing TCP segments were needed to carry the single
HTTP response and the text of the Bill of Rights?

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 browser
http://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 gaia.cs.umass.edu web site. The
image of the cover for our 5th edition (one of our favorite covers) is stored at
the caite.cs.umass.edu server. (These are two different web servers inside
cs.umass.edu).
• 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:

16. How many HTTP GET request messages did your browser send? To which
Internet addresses were these GET requests sent?
17. Can you tell whether your browser downloaded the two images serially, or
whether they were downloaded from the two web sites in parallel? Explain.

5 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:
• Make sure your browser’s cache is cleared, as discussed above, and close
down your browser. Then, start up your browser
• Start up the Wireshark packet sniffer
• Enter the following URL into your browser
http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/protected_pages/HTTP-wireshark-
file5.html
Type the requested user name and password into the pop up box.
 • 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-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:

18. What is the server’s response (status code and phrase) in response to the
initial HTTP GET message from your browser?
19. When your browser’s sends the HTTP GET message for the second time, what
new field is included in the HTTP GET message?

III. The required format for turning-in your assignment #2

To complete each question, yor need to attach the snapshoots for the
screens shown the packets captured by Wireshark, and then annotate your
answer to the snapshoots as follows:
a. Circle the answers (in RED color) on the snapshoot.
b. Add the text (in RED color) including the question number and your
answers to the questuion on the snapshoots.

For example,
 1. Client running HTTP 1.1

2. Accept-Language: zh-TW

~End of Assignment~