Message Sequence Charts

The main idea behind MessageSequenceCharts (MSC) would be to create a chart from the packets sent and received between machines. The strength of this project lies in the ability to use a sequence of filters on the packet flow captured. For example, this could only show TCP packets between 192.168.1.31 and 192.168.1.32, involved in a 3-way handshake. These charts can be saved as png/svg images for further use.

MSC is currently being developed as a plugin to PacketManipulator. MSC is developed and maintained by Abhiram Kasina and Luis A. Bastiao Silva is mentoring this project as a part of Umit Summer of Code.

For further queries mail me at (abhiram dot casina at gmail dot com)

SVN

svn checkout http://svn.umitproject.org/svnroot/umit/pm/branches/MSC

Build

PYTHONPATH=/home/../PM_trunk python setup.py install

It will generate the .ump file. Then load it under PacketManipulator.

Current Status

It has now been successfully integrated into the sniffing page of PacketManipulator. So, whenever an interface is sniffed, the plugin would start drawing a chart. The chart can now also be saved as a png file. Presently, I am working on creating a filter for the packets.

Future Work

• Make the display more dynamic
  • Be able to select IPs on the fly to be continuously displayed and those which can be removed with time (May be we can select an IP in the display ?)
    • Once you can select IPs/packets, we can start playing around with things like being able to select a packet and deploy it/see the packet header details.
  • Limit on the IPs to be decided based on the resolution and not a hard limit.
  • Add option to remove scaling on the time axis, so that all the packet relays are shown at same gaps even though the time intervals are different.
• IPv6 compliance
• Sequence Filter
  • Make the no. of packets in the filter dynamic, instead of the current 5 hard limit.

Screenshots