Department of Electrical Engineering

Faculty Member:_____________ Dated: ________________

Semester:___________________ Section: ________________

EE-357 Computer and Communication Networks

Experiment - 8
Wireshark – ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol)
CLO5-PLO9

Individual and Lab Report Quiz/viva

Name Reg. No Teamwork 10 Marks 5 Marks
5 Marks
 EXPERIMENT NO 8

Wireshark – ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol)

1.0 Objective of this lab:

In this lab, we’ll explore several aspects of the ICMP protocol. We will specifically study
ICMP messages that are used by the Ping and Traceroute programs. We will also study the
general format of ICMP messages.

2.0 Instructions:

 Read carefully before starting the lab.

 These exercises are to be done individually.

 You are supposed to provide the answers to the questions listed at the end of this
document, paste the screenshots of your working and upload the completed report to
your course’s LMS site.

 Avoid plagiarism by copying from the Internet or from your peers. You may refer to
source/ text but you must paraphrase the original work.

3.0 Background:

3.1 Internet protocol:

The Internet Protocol (IP) takes the stage when the datagram service between the hosts is
required in an interconnected network. These internetworks are connected using the
devices called Gateways. In some occasions where the gateway or the destination host
needs to communicate with the source host and these situations arise when there is an
error in datagram processing. These situations occur occasionally and in these situations,
the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) is used.

Some of the situations where the ICMP messages are sent are

1. The datagram is not transmitted to the destination host because of no routing entry.

2. When the gateway identifies a shorter route that the host can take to send the
datagrams to a destination.
3.2 ICMP Message Types:

Based on the type field, the message types are categorized into different groups. Each of
these messages carries different fields with respect to ICMP over the network. The summary
of these messages and the type is tabularized below.

Type Message Category

0 Echo Reply
3 Destination Unreachable
4 Source Quench
5 Redirect
8 Echo Request
11 Time Exceeded
12 Parameter Problem
13 Time Stamp
14 Time Stamp Reply
15 Information Request
16 Information Reply

3.3 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 www.ust.hk 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. 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 1 Command Prompt window after entering Ping command.

Figure 2 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; 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 2 Wireshark output for Ping program with Internet Protocol expanded.
Figure 3 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. Also note that this ICMP packet contains a checksum, an
identifier, and a sequence number.
 Figure 3: Wireshark capture of ping packet with ICMP packet expanded.

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.

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 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.

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. 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.
 Figure 4: Command Prompt window displays the results of the Traceroute program.

Figure 5 displays the Wireshark window for an ICMP packet returned by a router. Note that
this ICMP error packet contains many more fields than the Ping ICMP messages.

Figure 5: Wireshark window of ICMP fields expanded for one ICMP error packet.
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.

Answer the following questions:

1. What is the IP address of your host? What is the IP address of the target destination
host?
2. If ICMP sent UDP packets instead (as in Unix/Linux), would the IP protocol number
still be 0x01 for the probe packets? If not, what would it be?
3. 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?
4. Examine the ICMP error packet in your screenshot. It has more fields than the ICMP
echo packet. What is included in those fields?
5. 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?
6. Explain how ICMP helps in working of traceroute application?

Some useful tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glPuwhMNQ2s&ab_channel=internet-class
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G05y9UKT69s&ab_channel=internet-class
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUrTwIX7b8&ab_channel=internet-class
https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/big-endian-and-little-endian

Conclusion: