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Attacking Network Protocols

I am always trying to expand the boundaries of my knowledge. While I have a basic understanding of networking and a high-level understanding of security issues, I have never studied or read up on the specifics of packet sniffing or other network traffic security topics. This book changed that.

Attacking Network Protocols: A Hacker’s Guide to Capture, Analysis, and Exploitation takes a network attacker’s perspective while probing topics related to data and system vulnerability over a network. The author, James Forshaw, takes an approach similar to the perspective taken by penetration testers (pen testers), the so-called white hat security people who test a company’s security by trying to break through its defenses. The premise is that if you understand the vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you will be better equipped to protect against them. I agree with that premise.

Most of us in the Free and Open Source software world know about Wireshark and using it to capture network traffic information. This book mentions that tool, but focuses on using a different tool that was written by the author, called CANAPE.Core. Along the way, the author calls out multiple other resources for further study. I like and appreciate that very much! This is a complex topic and even a detailed and technically complex book like this one cannot possibly cover every aspect of the topic in 300 pages. What is covered is clearly expressed, technically deep, and valuable.

The book covers topics ranging from network basics to passive and active traffic capture all the way to the reverse engineering of applications. Along the way Forshaw covers network protocols and their structures, compilers and assemblers, operating system basics, CPU architectures, dissectors, cryptography, and the many causes of vulnerabilities.

Closing the book is an appendix (additional chapter? It isn’t precisely defined, but it is extra content dedicated to a specific topic) that describes a multitude of tools and libraries that the author finds useful, but may not have had an excuse to mention earlier in the book. This provides a set of signposts for the reader to follow for further research and is, again, much appreciated.

While I admit I am a novice in this domain, I found the book helpful, interesting, of sufficient depth to be immediately useful, with enough high-level descriptions and clarification to give me the context and thoughts for further study.

Disclosure: I was given my copy of this book by the publisher as a review copy. See also: Are All Book Reviews Positive?