[Winpcap-users] WinPCap for UMTS?

[Guy Harris]

On Mar 31, 2009, at 1:35 AM, Bozidar Lukovic wrote:

> i´m new to WinPCap and capturing packets and i have a quite special  
> problem.
> I´m writing a master thesis in which i need to capture packets,  
> which come in via UMTS.

Presumably these are PPP packets, not packets at, for example, the  
radio layer of UMTS.

> The first step will be capturing on a windows pc, later this should  
> be done on mobile devices (Win Mobile, Symbian, and so on).
> Is it possible to capture packets over UMTS card with WinPCap? The  
> problem i´m thinking of, is that an UMTS Card is not a network card,  
> but a modem.

As Patrick Sachet indicated, if what's running over UMTS is PPP, and  
the Windows networking stack uses the UMTS card the way it uses a dial- 
up modem, that should work with WinPcap the same way dial-up modems  
work.

> As i understood raw sockets shouldn´t work on an UMTS card, do they?

WinPcap doesn't use raw sockets; it uses NDIS to talk to most  
networking devices, and, for dial-up, I think it uses the same drivers  
that Microsoft Network Monitor uses.

Note that none of this will help on Symbian, of course, as it's a  
completely different operating system.  I think Windows Mobile is  
based on/descended from Windows CE; there exists a version of WinPcap  
for Windows CE, linked to from

	http://www.winpcap.org/install/default.htm

but whether it'll work on current versions of Windows Mobile is  
another matter (note all the caveats).  I can't speak for any of the  
Linux-based OSes used in mobile phones and, when last I looked at  
iPhone OS, the good news is that it *does* have BPF so you *can* run  
libpcap on it (in fact, there was a version of tcpdump available for  
jailbroken phones), but the bad news is that all you get on the mobile  
phone networking interface is raw IP packets (so if you need more  
detail, that's not available) and you would have to jailbreak the  
phone *and* will probably need to arrange to run as root.