Capturing USB communications to reverse engineer a driver
The USB specification includes details of how various standard devices should communicate so that they Just Work without needing a specific driver for your operating system (OS). The standards don’t include all devices and functionality though, so sometimes manufacturers define new ways to communicate with their device, and write a driver for one or more operating systems. Some manufacturers are open about what they’ve done so that others can write drivers for an OS the manufacturer doesn’t support, while others keep it secret. In that case if you want to write a driver you first need to work out how it communicates, so you need to listen in on its USB communications. Common Tool – Wireshark Wireshark is a widely used tool for traffic analysis. Originally for interpreting network protocols, it expanded to cover many other wire protocols including USB. In some OSs it can capture communications directly, while in others you need to capture to file with another tool then open in Wireshark for analysis. Capture Options In practice we’re usually looking at capturing traf