1. Cross Platform Network Calls Automation
Varun Bhal – Lead Software Engineer
Adobe Systems, Noida

2. Abstract
As we are moving towards cloud technology, most of the products and web apps involve background network calls in their workflows nowadays
Testing these calls give hard time to the tester, esp. the calls which are used to capture analytics, workflows registration, background update checks, etc. because you can’t see their impact on the UI
Web proxy tools like Fiddler, Charles, etc. are used to test such calls, but it’s a manual process and not all tools are cross platform
Tracing SSL requests (https calls) is again difficult with such tools and mostly supported in browsers only
Tshark is a command line utility which can be used to sniff http/https network calls and can be easily hooked with any automation framework

3. E.g. : Dynamic dialogs, advertisements, notification services, etc.
Types on network calls:
Impact on UI
E.g. : Dynamic dialogs, advertisements, notification services, etc.
Easy to test and validate
Easy to automate the UI test cases
No impact on UI
E.g. : Analytics calls, workflow registrations, background update checks, etc.
Need to sniff network traffic to validate the calls
Manual process
Difficult to automate across different platforms
Difficult to sniff and decrypt SSL requests
How to solve this?

4. Solution : Use Tshark
Command line network sniffing utility
Comes bundled with Wireshark – open source network protocol analyzer tool
Supports various filters while capturing or reading the packets
Supports SSL requests decryption
Can be easily hooked with any automation framework

5. Supported platforms :

6. Architecture : Web Server Client Tshark 3. Network calls
1. Start sniffing
2. Run test cases
4. Filtered results
4.1 Private key
to decrypt
https calls
Automation Framework
3. Network
calls
2. Run test cases
Mobile app
Private key
Only for https calls
Hotspot
0. Connected to hotspot
Test machine

7. Various workflows to be covered :
Read http requests
Read http response
Read https requests
Read https response
Sniffing on mobile platforms

8. Read http requests:
Request :
Sniff calls :
tshark -a duration:30 -w "C:\\capture.pcap”
Filter results :
tshark -r "C:\\capture.pcap" -Y "http.request.uri contains flashplayer" -T fields -e http.request.full_uri
Output :

9. Read http response:
Request :
Sniff calls :
tshark -a duration:30 -w "C:\\capture.pcap”
Filter results :
tshark -r "C:\\capture.pcap" -Y "http.content_type contains application" -X lua_script:extract.lua -X lua_script1:xml -T fields -e extractor.value.string > C:\output.txt
Output :

10. Read https requests and responses:
Sniff calls :
tshark -a duration:30 -w "C:\\capture.pcap”
Filter results :
tshark -o "ssl.desegment_ssl_records:TRUE" -o "ssl.desegment_ssl_application_data:TRUE" -o "ssl.keys_list: ,443,data,privatewp.key" -r “C:\capture.pcap” -Y "ssl contains frinstall" -T fields -e tcp.stream
Output -> 1,2
tshark -o "ssl.desegment_ssl_records:TRUE" -o "ssl.desegment_ssl_application_data:TRUE" -o "ssl.keys_list: ,443,data,privatewp.key" -r “C:\capture.pcap” -qz follow,ssl,ascii,1 > C:\outputs.txt

11. Read https response (cont):
Output :

12. Sniffing on mobile platforms :
Most of the mobile automation frameworks are driven from Desktop
Connect DUT to the Desktop via hotspot
Start sniffing on Desktop
Perform test cases on DUT
Filter requests and responses on Desktop using the technique discussed previously

13. Author Biography
Varun is a Lead Software engineer at Adobe with 5.5 years of industry experience in automation and tools development. He is a part of Flash Runtime team at Adobe and have exposure of working in installation, deployment and runtime test automation across different platforms, including Mobile technology. This is where he came across with this practice and got successful in implementing it in automation.

14. Thank You!!!