Then you can capture the wifi traffic, filter it, and then monitor the HTTP traffic from your mobile device. So if your mobile device is on the same wifi network as your Wireshark machine’s wifi card. With Wireshark, you tell it to capture traffic from your network card, and it can then capture any traffic going through that network. Unlike an HTTP proxy server where you have to configure your machine to point to the HTTP proxy server in order to monitor the traffic. Wireshark is a tool for monitoring network traffic. I’m using Mac to show you this functionality.

You may need to buy an additional adapter to do this.

Note that you may not be able to capture the mobile traffic on Windows because of WinPCap limitations. Tip: you can always use filter in Wireshark to just display the packets you want to see.You can find wireshark on line - it is a free tool.

You should use your own screenshot.ĭo you see any parallel connections your browser makes? If so, how many can you see in your screenshot? Again, use Wireshark to capture the traffic while you open up the page.Įxample screenshot below. Now, we will open a webpage with embeded objects (e.g., cnn.com which has a lot of images/videos embeded) in a browser. Example screenshot below.ĭescribe the TCP packets that you see, i.e., how each packet corresponds to TCP handshake, data transfer and closing connection steps. After the curl/wget is done, stop the capture in Wireshark. Warning: keep your other network activities to the minimum for a better experience, e.g., avoid streaming Netflix when capturing in Wireshark. Then you should be able to see packets flowing! Click the red square button on top to stop the capture. On the left side, select one (or more) interfaces that you want to capture from, then click “Start”. If you run into any problems, you can refer to for more detailed help. On Mac and Linux, you can also install from command line (homebrew/macports, yum install, apt-get install). You can find installation instructions here: We will use Wireshark, a network packet capture tool, to look at TCP packets when grabbing a webpage.

Open wireshark command line in mac