Reference no: EM132312845

Research Study

1 Topics
1. ICMP
2. IP

2 Instructions

1. Form a group of 2 students in the same session. It is your choice which student you want to team but your group mate should be fixed for all 4 labs.

2. Complete the lab according to the instructions in the following pages.

3. Answer all questions in the instruction, and write a group report. For each question, you need to 1) copy the question from instruction, 2) provide a screenshot and highlight the answer in the screenshot and 3) explain your answer with 1 or 2 sentences.

4. Include a coversheet of your lab report which has a list of your group members and how much each member of the group has contributed to the lab and the report. Ideally, you should have contributed the same amount. This will impact the mark each student gets.

5. You should observe lab rules and behave properly in the lab.

6. Relevant materials: ICMP - page 621-630; Ping - page 627; Traceroute - page 628; Echo Request and Reply - page 625; IPv4 - page 582-596; IP Higher-level Protocol Values - page 588.

In this lab, we'll explore several aspects of the ICMP protocol:

• ICMP messages generating by the Ping program;
• ICMP messages generated by the Traceroute program;
• the format and contents of an ICMP message.

Before attacking this lab, you're encouraged to review the ICMP material in section 4.4.3 of the text1. We present this lab in the context of the Microsoft Windows operating system. However, it is straightforward to translate the lab to a Unix or Linux environment.

1. ICMP and Ping

Let's begin our ICMP adventure by capturing the packets generated by the Ping program. You may recall that the Ping program is simple tool that allows anyone (for example, a network administrator) to verify if a host is live or not. The Ping program in the source host sends a packet to the target IP address; if the target is live, the Ping program in the target host responds by sending a packet back to the source host. As you might have guessed (given that this lab is about ICMP), both of these Ping packets are ICMP packets.

Do the following:

• Let's begin this adventure by opening the Windows Command Prompt application (which can be found in your Accessories folder).
• Start up the Wireshark packet sniffer, and begin Wireshark packet capture.

• The ping command is in c:\windows\system32, so type either "ping -n 10 hostname" or "c:\windows\system32\ping -n 10 hostname" in the MS-DOS command line (without quotation marks), where hostname is a host on another continent. If you're outside of Asia, you may want to enter ece website for the Web server at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The argument "-n 10" indicates that 10 ping messages should be sent. Then run the Ping program by typing return.
• When the Ping program terminates, stop the packet capture in Wireshark.

At the end of the experiment, your Command Prompt Window should look something like Figure 1 (attached). In this example, the source ping program is in Massachusetts and the destination Ping program is in Hong Kong. From this window we see that the source ping program sent 10 query packets and received 10 responses. Note also that for each response, the source calculates the round-trip time (RTT), which for the 10 packets is on average 375 msec.

Figure 2 (attached) provides a screenshot of the Wireshark output, after "icmp" has been entered into the filter display window. Note that the packet listing shows 20 packets: the 10 Ping queries sent by the source and the 10 Ping responses received by the source. Also note that the source's IP address is a private address (behind a NAT) of the form 192.168/12; the destination's IP address is that of the Web server at HKUST. Now let's zoom in on the first packet (sent by the client); in the figure below, the packet contents area provides information about this packet. We see that the IP datagram within this packet has protocol number 01, which is the protocol number for ICMP. This means that the payload of the IP datagram is an ICMP packet.

Figure 3 (attached) focuses on the same ICMP but has expanded the ICMP protocol information in the packet contents window. Observe that this ICMP packet is of Type 8 and Code 0 - a so-called ICMP "echo request" packet. (See Figure 4.23 of text.) Also note that this ICMP packet contains a checksum, an identifier, and a sequence number.

What to Hand In:

You should hand in a screen shot of the Command Prompt window similar to Figure 1 above. Whenever possible, when answering a question below, you should hand in a printout of the packet(s) within the trace that you used to answer the question asked.

Annotate the printout2 to explain your answer. To print a packet, use File->Print, choose
Selected packet only, choose Packet summary line, and select the minimum amount of packet detail that you need to answer the question.

You should answer the following questions:

1. What is the IP address of your host? What is the IP address of the destination host?

2. Why is it that an ICMP packet does not have source and destination port numbers?

3. Examine one of the ping request packets sent by your host. What are the ICMP type and code numbers? What other fields does this ICMP packet have? How many bytes are the checksum, sequence number and identifier fields?

4. Examine the corresponding ping reply packet. What are the ICMP type and code numbers? What other fields does this ICMP packet have? How many bytes are the checksum, sequence number and identifier fields?

2. ICMP and Traceroute

Let's now continue our ICMP adventure by capturing the packets generated by the Traceroute program. You may recall that the Traceroute program can be used to figure out the path a packet takes from source to destination. Traceroute is discussed in Section
and in Section 4.4 of the text.

Traceroute is implemented in different ways in Unix/Linux/MacOS and in Windows. In Unix/Linux, the source sends a series of UDP packets to the target destination using an unlikely destination port number; in Windows, the source sends a series of ICMP packets to the target destination. For both operating systems, the program sends the first packet with TTL=1, the second packet with TTL=2, and so on. Recall that a router will decrement a packet's TTL value as the packet passes through the router. When a packet arrives at a router with TTL=1, the router sends an ICMP error packet back to the source. In the following, we'll use the native Windows tracert program. A shareware version of a much nice Windows Traceroute program is pingplotter (www.pingplotter.com). We'll use pingplotter in our Wireshark IP lab since it provides additional functionality that we'll need there.

Do the following:

- Let's begin by opening the Windows Command Prompt application (which can be found in your Accessories folder).
- Start up the Wireshark packet sniffer, and begin Wireshark packet capture.
- The tracert command is in c:\windows\system32, so type either "tracert hostname" or "c:\windows\system32\tracert hostname" in the MS-DOS command line (without quotation marks), where hostname is a host on another continent. (Note that on a Windows machine, the command is "tracert" and not "traceroute".) If you're outside of Europe, you may want to enter www.inria.fr for the Web server at INRIA, a computer science research institute in France. Then run the Traceroute program by typing return.
• When the Traceroute program terminates, stop packet capture in Wireshark.

At the end of the experiment, your Command Prompt Window should look something like Figure 4. In this figure, the client Traceroute program is in Massachusetts and the target destination is in France. From this figure we see that for each TTL value, the source program sends three probe packets. Traceroute displays the RTTs for each of the probe packets, as well as the IP address (and possibly the name) of the router that returned the ICMP TTL-exceeded message.

What to Hand In:

For this part of the lab, you should hand in a screen shot of the Command Prompt window. Whenever possible, when answering a question below, you should hand in a printout of the packet(s) within the trace that you used to answer the question asked. Annotate the printout to explain your answer. To print a packet, use File->Print, choose Selected packet only, choose Packet summary line, and select the minimum amount of packet detail that you need to answer the question.

Answer the following questions:

5. What is the IP address of your host? What is the IP address of the target destination host?

6. If ICMP sent UDP packets instead (as in Unix/Linux), would the IP protocol number still be 01 for the probe packets? If not, what would it be?

7. Examine the ICMP echo packet in your screenshot. Is this different from the ICMP ping query packets in the first half of this lab? If yes, how so?

8. Examine the ICMP error packet in your screenshot. It has more fields than the ICMP echo packet. What is included in those fields?

9. Examine the last three ICMP packets received by the source host. How are these packets different from the ICMP error packets? Why are they different?

10. Within the tracert measurements, is there a link whose delay is significantly longer than others? Refer to the screenshot in Figure 4, is there a link whose delay is significantly longer than others? On the basis of the router names, can you guess the location of the two routers on the end of this link?

2. A look at the captured trace

In your trace, you should be able to see the series of ICMP Echo Request (in the case of Windows machine) or the UDP segment (in the case of Unix) sent by your computer and the ICMP TTL-exceeded messages returned to your computer by the intermediate routers. In the questions below, we'll assume you are using a Windows machine; the corresponding questions for the case of a Unix machine should be clear. Whenever possible, when answering a question below you should hand in a printout of the packet(s) within the trace that you used to answer the question asked. 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).To print a packet, use File->Print, choose Selected packet only, choose Packet summary line, and select the minimum amount of packet detail that you need to answer the question.

1. Select the first ICMP Echo Request message sent by your computer, and expand the Internet Protocol part of the packet in the packet details window.

What is the IP address of your computer?

2. Within the IP packet header, what is the value in the upper layer protocol field?

3. How many bytes are in the IP header? How many bytes are in the payload of the IP datagram? Explain how you determined the number of payload bytes.

4. Has this IP datagram been fragmented? Explain how you determined whether or not the datagram has been fragmented.

Next, sort the traced packets according to IP source address by clicking on the Source column header; a small downward pointing arrow should appear next to the word Source. If the arrow points up, click on the Source column header again. Select the first ICMP Echo Request message sent by your computer, and expand the Internet Protocol portion in the "details of selected packet header" window. In the "listing of captured packets" window, you should see all of the subsequent ICMP messages (perhaps with additional interspersed packets sent by other protocols running on your computer) below this first ICMP. Use the down arrow to move through the ICMP messages sent by your computer.

5. Which fields in the IP datagram always change from one datagram to the next within this series of ICMP messages sent by your computer?

6. Which fields stay constant? Which of the fields must stay constant? Which fields must change? Why?

7. Describe the pattern you see in the values in the Identification field of the IP datagram

Next (with the packets still sorted by source address) find the series of ICMP TTL- exceeded replies sent to your computer by the nearest (first hop) router.

8. What is the value in the Identification field and the TTL field?

9. Do these values remain unchanged for all of the ICMP TTL-exceeded replies sent to your computer by the nearest (first hop) router? Why?

Fragmentation
Sort the packet listing according to time again by clicking on the Time column.

10. Find the first ICMP Echo Request message that was sent by your computer after you changed the Packet Size in pingplotter to be 2000. Has that message been fragmented across more than one IP datagram?

11. Print out the first fragment of the fragmented IP datagram. What information in the IP header indicates that the datagram been fragmented? What information in the IP header indicates whether this is the first fragment versus a latter fragment? How long is this IP datagram?

12. Print out the second fragment of the fragmented IP datagram. What information in the IP header indicates that this is not the first datagram fragment? Are the more fragments? How can you tell?

13. What fields change in the IP header between the first and second fragment?

Now find the first ICMP Echo Request message that was sent by your computer after you changed the Packet Size in pingplotter to be 3500.

14. How many fragments were created from the original datagram?

15. What fields change in the IP header among the fragments?

Attachment:- Research Study.rar