Lab 03

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol(HTTP) using WireShark

Objective:
The objective of this lab is that the students will 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.

Instructor Note:
The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the Web’s application-layer protocol, is at the heart of
the Web. It is defined in [RFC 1945] and [RFC 2616]. HTTP is implemented in two programs: a
client program and a server program. The client program and server program, executing on
different end systems, talk to each other by exchanging HTTP messages. HTTP defines the
structure of these messages and how the client and server exchange the messages.

In this Wireshark lab, you’ll capture some http packets using wireshark and make some
observations on them. For more details, please check the below reference.
References:
 Jim Kurose, Keith Ross, "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach," 8th edition, Pearson, 2020.
 Wireshark Labs, https://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/wireshark.php
 Wireshark User Guide: https://www.wireshark.org/download/docs/user-guide.pdf
 Wireshark Walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkCSr30UojM
 Wireshark Website: https://www.wireshark.org

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1. Solved Lab Activites
Sr.No Allocated Time Level of Complexity CLO Mapping
1 20 Low CLO-6
2 20 Low CLO-6
3 15 Medium CLO-6
4 15 Medium CLO-6

Activity 1:
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

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.

1
References to figures and sections are for the 7th edition of our text, Computer Networks, A Top-down Approach,
7th ed., J.F. Kurose and K.W. Ross, Addison-Wesley/Pearson, 2016.
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 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

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).
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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? 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?

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 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 2.2.5 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

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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.
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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 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:

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 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?

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 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

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 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.

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.

3. Graded Lab Tasks

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
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  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?

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