Wireshark v1.6 adds support for OPC UA

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The industry standard for secure communication in automation—OPC Unified Architecture—is now supported by the network analyzer Wireshark.

Schwabach, August 2011. Wireshark comes in version 1.6.0 by default with a Plug-in for decoding the OPC UA binary protocol. The OPC UA dissector was donated by ascolab GmbH.

The widely known open-source network analyzer tool traces the telegram exchange between network nodes and stores it in a so calles capture file. Using the OPC UA Dissectors these OPC UA messages can be filtered, decoded and their content can be displayed.


The TCP/IP based OPC UA binary proticol can, if used un-encrypted, be analyzed down to the call level of single service request/response telegrams, hence analyzing the logic sequence or the timing behavior of communication between OPC UA Client and server application is easily possible.

“This is a very helpful tool for all developers and system integrators of OPC UA products.” says Jürgen Boxberger, CEO of Unified Automation. “We are very happy for providing such a powerfull analyzing tool. In addition to the compliance test tool (UA-CTT) of the OPC Foundation, Wireshark allowes diagnostic directly on the cable.”

The development was done by the software service partner— the company ascolab GmbH—which also developed the official OPC UA ANSI C communication stack of the OPC Foundation.

A HowTo with tips on operation of the Wireshark OPC UA network sniffer can be found in the forum of the website www.unifiedautomation.com/forum.

About Unified Automation

As a leading supplier of OPC UA software Unified Automation provides UA enabled products, cross-platform toolkits and development frameworks in different programming languages. The target market of OPC UA products starts from manufacturers of embedded devices up to developers of enterprise applications. Unified Automation sees itself as technology provider whose software development kits (SDK) are world wide the most used and form the base of OPC UA product of nearly all large and many small automation vendors.

About the Author

Since 2008 Jürgen Boxberger is CEO of Unified Automation GmbH located in Schwabach. Unified Automation focused it portfolio very early on the industrial communication standard OPC Unified Architecture and today is one of the market leaders and innovative enthusiast of this technology.