Show HN: Stratoshark, a sibling application to Wireshark

(stratoshark.org)

140 points | by geraldcombs 6 hours ago ago

30 comments

  • clbrmbr 2 hours ago

    Wireshark is to tcpdump as stratoshark is to strace.

    Did I get the analogy right?

    • geraldcombs 2 hours ago

      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

  • freedomben 3 hours ago

    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

  • pimlottc 3 hours ago

    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?

    • geraldcombs 2 hours ago

      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.

      • sesm 2 hours ago

        So, DTrace with Wireshark UI?

        • geraldcombs 2 hours ago

          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.

    • gertrunde 3 hours ago

      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!)

      • vasco 2 hours ago

        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?

        • geraldcombs 2 hours ago

          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.

          • kristopolous an hour ago

            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

          • vasco 2 hours ago

            Thanks for confirming and thanks again for the amazing work.

  • thesuitonym 16 minutes ago

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

  • tarasglek 42 minutes ago

    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

  • zokier 28 minutes ago

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

  • mdaniel 5 hours ago

    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...

  • observationist 2 hours ago

    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.

    • geraldcombs 2 hours ago

      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?

  • imcritic 3 hours ago

    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?

  • brutopia an hour ago

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

    • geraldcombs an hour ago

      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

  • n1g3ld0uglas2 5 hours ago

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

  • napolux 6 hours ago

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

  • westurner 5 hours ago

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