How to generate H323 (Including H225 & H245) protocol packets? - network-programming

I'm trying to write a simple DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) tool. In my current phase, I need to develop a H.323 protocol detector. To aim this goal I need a H.225 / H.245 packet generator. I seems that almost all tool use SIP and RTP & RTCP protocol. Does anybody have any idea which tool use H323 protocols in VOIP?

There is number of h323 libraries, some of them are openh323 and openoh323/openooh323.
But ALL libraries have issues and alot of bugs. Main issue - protocol is VERY complex if compare with sip or other modern protocols and ALL vendors do "vendor-specific" addons/changes in protocol way they think "better for client".
As result it is hard to work with any tools. Easy way detect is just get signatures like 'h323', 'rtp' etc.

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Tool chain for proprietary communication protocol

I (the company rather) have a protocol implementation which uses the CAN hardware (CAN Transceiver). The protocol itself is not a standard CAN protocol stack. Is it possible to use any of the off the shelf CAN-bus monitors for debugging and investigating the data in the bus? I intend to see the bytes being transmitted and more importantly the other information like cycle time, frequency, delay, jitter (if any) and so on. Ofcourse more information is good and in-case some of these above mentioned parameters are missing, its still acceptable. The main purpose of the project is to show that the proprietary implementation is better (performance, bandwidth, speed, etc) than standard CAN stack while still using the CAN hardware (transceivers).
I think most commercial available CAN analyzers can do what you need. Look if they offer an option for programability, in order to provide the possibility to make your own interpretation of the CAN frames.
Can-Wiki offers a list
http://www.emtas.de/en/produkte/can-interpreter

How does SWIFT work?

I would like to understand the way SWIFT messages work. I tried to understand from Google and it says that it uses packet switched network mechanism.
It would be of great favour if somebody can throw light on the following questions
Whether SWIFT by itself a communication protocol like AS2
For Trade finance system if I use IMEX does using a SWIFT message requires any Adapter kind of components with IMEX
Architecture of SWIFT
How SWIFT works is a big subject, but it's basically a proprietary protocol driven by the needs of the SWIFT community.
Since it all started in the early days of computing, the core stuff uses the UNIX philosophy of: write programs to do one thing, do it well, and use text as your inter program communication.
So, to take FIN messaging, SWIFT works using ASCII text files across a secure network.
To be able to send and receive these text files you need to join SWIFT. See http://www.swift.com/ordering/join_swift
The architecture is proprietary, but, once you join SWIFT you can send and receive specifically formatted text files, or, in the "next generation" it's XML but, to me, that is trying to re-invent the UNIX philosophy, which is bound to fail, and be very expensive in the process. But apparently this is what clients wanted...........?
So there you have it...

Sockets (TCP/UDP) on iPad WITHOUT Objective-C

Is there a way to make use of iPad/iPhone's socket capabilities without using Objective-C? Is there any way to expose this functionality with ActionScript 3 or some über HTML5 framework?
On the Arduino forums I'm trying to find out my hardware limits, here and here (I found out that using Objective-C this would be possible, even with bonjour discovery).
(With webSockets, or with UDP. It doesn't have to be Haxe.)
I'm researching the possibility of using webSockets, which should be the easiest if it's possible.
However, I'd like to consider all options. So I know Arduino can talk raw UDP. And I know that there is a CocoaAsyncSocket library for Objective-C. Only, I'd like to NOT prototype in Objective-C...
(So, this will be the n-th post on Stack Overflow about a Wi-Fi-enabled Arduino that I'd like to talk to an iDevice. Bluetooth is not an option due to Apple's non-prototyping-friendly-MFi-program.)
You can use the C POSIX socket API (probably easiest, if you know C). Or you can use HTML5/Javascript and Haxe or socket.io.

Tool for network traffic analysis of a custom protocol

The protocol is very simple and is developed on top of TCP. I need to analyze a big libpcap dump file to calculate the average value and standard deviation of the conversation time and of the number of packets per conversation.
Using Wireshark it's simple to analyze the TCP conversations between the endpoints, but the summary includes all of the TCP packets (lots of SYNs, ACKs and FINs), and this messes up the data.
Is there another tool to do this kind of analysis? Is there a way to EASILY extend Wireshark's functionality?
You can check out the Argos custom protocol analyzer.
It is a commercial tool and it has a powerful and easy to use XML protocol definition language.
Additionally it can monitor Ethernet and IP traffic as Wireshark does and open Libcap files
Not sure I understand exactly what you need, but if you're looking to analyze only the packets with application data in them you can ask Wireshark to display only those packets with the PSH ("push to application") flag set.
What exactly this protocol contains? Is there any specific header for its own usage? Wireshark provides many complex filtering options that you can explore.
If you want to do it using program, you can try PCAP or PF_SOCK. You may need to write your own filtering criteria then.
Is there another tool to do this kind of analysis? Is there a way to
EASILY extend Wireshark's functionality?
You can try Scapy ( http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/ ), with Scapy it is very easy to add new protocols: http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/doc/build_dissect.html .
Scapy is not as Wireshark, but I think it will solve your problem.

Available Game network protocol definition languages and code generation

I've been looking for a good general purpose binary network protocol definition framework to provide a way to write real-time game servers and clients (think World Of Warcraft or Quake III) in multiple languages (e.g. Java backend server and iPhone front-end client written in Objective-C and Cocoa).
I want to support Java Flash clients, iPhone clients and C# clients on windows (and XNA clients on XBOX).
I'm looking for a way to efficiently send/receive messages over a TCP/IP or UDP socket stream connection. I'm not looking for something that can be sent over an HTTP Web Service, like JSON or XML marshalled Objects. Although Hessian's binary web service protocol is a very interesting solution
I want a network protocol format and client/server basic implementation that will allow a client to connect to a server and send any message in the defined protocol and receive any message in the protocol without having to bind to some kind of RPC endpoint. I want a generic stream of any message in my protocol incoming and outgoing. This is so that I can support things like the server sending all clients the positions of various entities in the game every 100 milliseconds.
The network protocol frameworks I've found are as follows:
Google's Protocol Buffer - but it lacks support for things like sending/receiving arbitrary messages from your given protocol.
Apache Thrift - an interesting option but it is geared mainly towards RPC instead of generic game client/server socket type connections where the client or server can send messages at any time and not just in response to a client RPC request.
Raknet Multiplayer - Raknet provides full multiplayer network library (it's free for indie development with revenue under $250k)
UPDATE : OculusVR Acquired RakNet and its Free/OpenSource now. U can find it on Github
Hessian Binary Web Service Protocol - is a HTTP web service binary protocol, it is well-suited to sending binary data without any need to extend the protocol with attachments.
Raknet provides a good game/simulation oriented multiplayer library.
Apache Thrift and Google's protocol buffers seem to be the simplest approaches to using in a game network protocol client/server architecture.
Hessian seems like a great fit if you want to create a web based game server with a Java or flash client using some type of server push technology like COMET. Hessian might provide a really interesting way to support real-time games on the web and even be able to host them on VM web solutions like Google's App engine or Amazon's EC2.
There's some discussion about using various protocol definition frameworks for games and other uses:
Comparison of Various Serialization Frameworks
Thrift vs Protocol Buffers - Thrift is declared the better framework because it has a fully supported RPC client/server implementation
Using Protocol Buffers for client server Game API determining what type of message to decode
Bi-Directional RPC using thrift
DIS
If you do go the route of writing your own protocol, you may want to read the answer I posted here.
In summary it discusses what you should think about when writing a protocol, and list a few tricks for versioning and maintaining backwards and forward compatibility.
If you are really concerned about multiple platforms and language, be sure to take into account endian issues. A binary protocol designed for this use must use network-byte-order, so it needs custom per-data-type serialization functions; you cannot just blindly push C structs into network buffers.
A common solution for this problem at game companies is to have protocol description language or specification in a simple format like XML or python or lua, and then have code generation for each target language that generated packet classes with both data structure and serialization. This specification could use a type system that starts with basic types, then extends to include game-specific types with semantic information, enumerations or more complex structures. For example a data file could look like:
Attack = {
source = 'objectId',
target = 'objectId',
weapon = 'weapon::WEAP_MAIN',
seed = 'int'
}
This could generate code like:
#define PT_ATTACK 10002
class PacketAttack : public Packet {
public:
PacketAttack () : m_packetType(PacketAttack::s_packetType) {}
ObjectId m_source;
ObjectId m_target;
WeaponType m_weapon;
int m_seed;
bool Write(Stream* outStream) {
Packet::Write(outStream);
outStream << m_source;
outStream << m_target;
outStream << m_weapon
outStream << m_seed;
}
bool Read(Stream* inStream);
static const int s_packetType;
};
This does require some more infrastructure.. streams, packet base classes, safe serialization functions..
I want to echo Bill K's suggestion. It's not hard to roll your own protocol.
For the iPhone side, have a look at AsyncSocket which support for delimiter based TCP packets built in, and it's not hard to build a solution which uses packet headers.
If you quickly want to have a testserver to play against AsyncSocket on the iPhone, you can look at Naga (for the java server part) which has ready made stuff both for delimiter based packets and packets with headers. Naga was partially written with networked games in mind.
I disagree with "roll your with simple delimited strings approach": question is, what exactly would be the benefit? Getting to write and maintain more code?
The only reasons I could see would be lack of tool support (writing for some odd platform), or specific (very) hard performance or message size constraints.
Or, sometimes, really wanting to write a format -- that's ok, but it must be an explicit reason.
Depending on exact needs I would suggest considering JSON, since it can read and write arbitrary messages; has good object binders for Java (just like xml), is easier to read than binary formats, and is all around "good enough" for many use cases.
If message size is very important, Protobuf can work well -- while its size is not always as small as gzipped alternatives (gzip+xml, gzip+json compress very well), it's usually close.
ASN.1 fits the definition of "good general purpose binary network protocol definition framework". It's also standardized by ITU-T, so there's a lot of existing tools and libraries for various languages.
The DER encoding is suitable for efficient network communications, the XER encoding for human-readable (and writable) permanent storage.
Because you want to use different languages and also because you want something clean/small, I suggest the protocol buffers of google. You need a pre-compile part for the RPC but I really think that's the best option when you begin to mix different languages.. Here's the link: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html
Why not implement UDP directly? Your question mostly mentions what you don't want.. What further form of abstration do you want on top of UDP?
Download the Quake III sourcecode and see how they frame game updates over UDP?
The IP protocol has been designed to support multiple devices/OSes in a uniform way, isn't this what you ask for?
What protocol has implementations across a huge range of systems, hmm, IP perhaps?

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