Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Sniffing Shoretel Calls

Awhile back, after I did my Wireshark presentation for ILTA, someone asked me about using Wireshark to capture ShoreTel VOIP calls.  It turns out that capturing the call was easy, but as there is no codec for Wireshark translating the call session to a WAV file or other audio file was a little more tricky.  Before you jump all over me about privacy and security concerns….the issue here is about call troubleshooting not eavesdropping.  Sometimes you want to be able to capture a call so that you can understand exactly what a user is hearing. Voice Echo, call quality and extra garbled noises as all acceptable reasons to want to be able to capture and play back a call.  So if you’re gonna do some funny business and listen in on someone’s calls…you are on your own. I don’t condone eavesdropping for any reason. On with the show…

So after spending a few hours looking at codecs for WireShark that would work with Shoretel I ran into a forum post about how someone accomplished the same objective with Cain.

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Cain & Abel is a popular password cracking tool but it also contains a full blown sniffer.  Using this tool I was successfully able to record a call from my ShoreTel IP230G phone.  Here are the quick and dirty instructions if you are interested:

  1. Install Cain
  2. Run Cain
  3. Hit Configure on the menu at the top
  4. Select your nic from the list and hit Ok
  5. Select the Sniffer tab
  6. On the BOTTOM of the screen select the VOIP tab
  7. Hit the "start/stop sniffer" button in the button bar
  8. Make a call (you'll see it recording in the interface)
  9. End the call
  10. Wait for the interface to show that it’s captured the call in it’s entirety.
  11. Double click the recorded call it hear it. It's also saved as a wav under c:\program files\cain\voip

I have all the codecs supported by Shoretel loaded, but for my test call I was using L16/16000.  Also note that you need to use a network TAP or a switchport monitor capturing both directions if you want capture both sides of the call.

Enjoy the packet capture goodness.

4 comments:

Thompson said...

Shoretel's VOIP solutions is the world's foremost leader best telephone technology. Shoretel's technology ranges from both hardware and software, and is best of class enterprise level equipment.

Rolfsa said...

So Mr. Btxchange.com...feel free to keep your ads to yourself and the hell off my blog.

Geoff Works - Regional Sales Engineer, ShoreTel said...

As an Engineer for ShoreTel, I would just like to comment that ShoreTel's newest release v9.0 supports 128-bit AES media encryption. (as well as 802.1x too!) Thank you.

Get a Toll Free Number said...

In any case I will be subscribing to your feed and I am hoping you write once more very soon!