When using such a complex program like Wireshark, it's sometimes useful to understand the mechanisms and concepts behind the surface. This is an approach to shed some light on the inner workings of Wireshark.

When Wireshark starts, a lot of things are done: initialize the dissectors (register the protocol tree), including plugins load and set values from the preferences file load the capture filters from the cfilters file load the display filters from the dfilters file load and set the disabled protocols from the disabled_protos file init libpcap/winpcap (the capturing engine) process command line parameters load and set the recently used GUI settings from the recent file init and show the main screen if specified by command line, load a capture file or start capturing

Each protocol has its own protocol dissector. A dissector is called from Wireshark, if the packet data seems to be of that corresponding protocol. The dissector will then process the packet data and call back Wireshark if it couldn't dissect all the data in that packet to do any further dissections. So Wireshark will dissect a packet from the lowest to the highest protocol layers. But how does Wireshark know, which dissector to choose? At program start, the dissector registers itself at the appropriate place(s). There are two ways, how a dissector can register itself for packet data: static if the dissector knows a specific value of a lower layer, if can directly register itself there (e.g. the HTTP dissector "knows", that typically the well known TCP port 80 is used to transport HTTP data). heuristic if no such well known way exists, the dissector can register itself for the heuristic mechanism. If a lower layer dissector has to handle some packet data where no well known way exists, it can handover the packet to Wireshark's heuristic mechanism. This will ask all registered upper layer dissectors, if they "like" that data. Each of these dissectors will typically look into the first few bytes of the packet, if it contains some characteristic data of that protocol. So the dissector can accept or reject to dissect that packet. Let's look at an example: We'll assume, Wireshark loads a TCP/IP/Ethernet packet. Wireshark will call the Ethernet dissector, which will dissect the Ethernet related data (usually the first 6+6+2 bytes). Then this dissector calls back into Wireshark and will pass the rest of the data back to Wireshark. Wireshark in turn will call the next related dissector, in our case the IP dissector (because of the value 0x800 in the Ethernet type field). This game will continue, until no more data has to be dissected, or the data is just unknown to Wireshark. You can control the way Wireshark calls its dissectors, see for details.