DEVOPSdigest

Sysdig announced a new foundation that will serve as the long-term custodian of the Wireshark open source project.

Wireshark is a traffic protocol analyzer, with more than 2,000 contributors and over 60 million downloads in the last five years. Sysdig, as Wireshark’s current corporate sponsor, encouraged the creation of the foundation. The nonprofit will be home to SharkFest, Wireshark’s developer and user conference, and the Wireshark source code and assets.

This July, Wireshark will celebrate its 25th anniversary as an open source project. Over the years, Wireshark has been sponsored by several companies. Most recently, in January 2022, Sysdig assumed responsibility for the project. The move into the Wireshark Foundation donates Wireshark to the community and ensures that Wireshark has a long-term home that goes beyond a specific company or sponsor.

Ethereal, the predecessor of Wireshark, was originally created in 1998 by Gerald Combs, Director of Open Source Projects at Sysdig. Together, Gerald and Loris Degioanni, CTO and Founder of Sysdig, launched Wireshark in 2006. An open source GUI network package capturing tool, Wireshark enables teams to monitor network traffic, learn protocols and packet basics, and troubleshoot network problems. Wireshark is a standard for checking health and security at a packet level. Wireshark takes packet captures and saves them for later viewing. Teams can filter through that traffic to find evidence from an incident.

The Wireshark Foundation will have an open governance model that encourages participation and technical contribution. The foundation will provide a framework for long-term stewardship and sustainability of projects it governs. The foundation is launching with Sheri Najafi as the foundation’s executive director, and Loris Degioanni, Janice Spampinato, Hansang Bae, Sheri Najafi, and Gerald Combs on the board. The foundation will also take over management of SharkFest.

Sysdig was founded as an open source company, and the Sysdig platform was built on an open source foundation to address the security challenges of modern cloud applications. Open source Sysdig and Falco are projects created by Sysdig to leverage deep visibility as a foundation for security. These projects have become standards for container and cloud threat detection and incident response. Falco, which Sysdig contributed to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2018, is now an incubation-level hosted project with more than 50 million downloads. In addition to Sysdig-created tools, Sysdig is powered by open source tools, such as OPA, Prometheus, and eBPF.