Open Source Serial Port Sniffer Hardware

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Serial Port Sniffer Open Source
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Serial Port Sniffer Open Source
Open Source Serial Port Monitor

From time to time, I need to dump USB traffic under Windows, mostly to support hardware under Linux, so my primary goal is to produce dump files for protocol analysis.

Serial port analyzer also displays, logs, and analyzes all data flows among serial ports and can send data in various formats, thus working as a terminal. This RS232 port monitor is mainly intended for those who develop and debug software and hardware serial port solutions.
To educate current and future generations of network engineers, network architects, application engineers, network consultants, and other IT professionals in best practices for troubleshooting, securing, analyzing, and maintaining productive, efficient networking infrastructures through use of the Wireshark free, open source analysis tool.

The source code is comprised of two main parts: hardware-side source code; GUI-side source codeZBOSS Sniffer supports TI SmartRf05EB and CC2531 USB Dongle. Packets are sent to PC via RS-232 interface when using a board and via USB when using a dongle (virtual serial port is emulated). ZBOSS Sniffer source code for hardware can be compiled in.

For USB traffic, it seems that SniffUsb is the clear winner... It works under Windows XP (but not later) and has a much nicer GUI than earlier versions. It produces huge dump files, but everything is there.

However, my device is in fact a USB serial device, so I turned to Portmon which can sniff serial port traffic without the USB overhead.

Samuel Liew♦

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dpavlindpavlin

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6 Answers

Personally, I'd use QEMU or KVM and instrument their USB passthrough code, and then use libusb to prototype the replacement driver in user space (this latter bit I've done before; writing USB device drivers in Python is fun!).

Peter Mortensen

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Charles DuffyCharles Duffy

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Since people don't seem to realize it, Wireshark does monitor USB traffic and has a parser for it; but the catch is it only works under Linux. Wireshark on Windows will not do this.
It may be possible to plug the USB device you want to monitor, along with a Linux machine (with Wireshark running) and your Windows machine and just use the USB device under Windows.
Problem with the above? I don't know how the Linux machine or the Windows machine will detect each other.

Peter Mortensen

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jamkomojamkomo

After five years waiting, now it's possible to sniff usb packets on windows

See http://desowin.org/usbpcap/tour.html for a quick tour. It works pretty well

albfanalbfan

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USBSnoop works too - and is free.

Or, you could buy a USB to Ethernet converter and use whatever network sniffer you prefer to see the data.

Maxime

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gbjbaanbgbjbaanb

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Busdog, an open source project hosted on github, has worked well for me. It has a driver it installs to allow it to monitor USB communications. The config window allows you to reinstall or remove the device at any time.

You can select the USB device you want from an enumerated list. A nice feature is to have it automatically trace a new device that is plugged in:

Data communications to and from an SWR analyzer I was reverse engineering were captured flawlessly:

Kurt FitznerKurt Fitzner

Microsoft Message Analyzer can capture USB traffic as well, if download Device and Log File parser from MS: link

Renat

Serial Port Sniffer Open Source

Renat