11.12. Object Identifiers

Many protocols that use ASN.1 use Object Identifiers (OIDs) to uniquely identify certain pieces of information. In many cases, they are used in an extension mechanism so that new object identifiers (and associated values) may be defined without needing to change the base standard.

While Wireshark has knowledge about many of the OIDs and the syntax of their associated values, the extensibility means that other values may be encountered.

Wireshark uses this table to allow the user to define the name and syntax of Object Identifiers that Wireshark does not know about (for example, a privately defined X.400 extension). It also allows the user to override the name and syntax of Object Identifiers that Wireshark does know about (e.g. changing the name “id-at-countryName” to just “c”).

This table is a user table, as described in Section 11.7, “User Table”, with the following fields:

OID
The string representation of the Object Identifier e.g. “2.5.4.6”.
Name
The name that should be displayed by Wireshark when the Object Identifier is dissected e.g. (“c”);
Syntax
The syntax of the value associated with the Object Identifier. This must be one of the syntaxes that Wireshark already knows about (e.g. “PrintableString”).