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I've reverse engineered some protocols -- haven't done a USB one yet, but I'm sure the principals are similar. Grab some data, look at it (usually with a good hex editor -- last time I used ghex2), look for patterns. Usually there's some sort of packet structure, or maybe some data that looks like something in ascii -- ghex2 shows you what every 2 bytes or 4 bytes are if they were signed/unsigned ints, floats etc. Usually something will jump out at you.

It's a fun game usually.




And if you can actually input data using the protocol, you can take some standard packets and tweak a byte/short/long at a time and see what changes.

Reversing USB is the same as any protocol on top of TCP is the same as any other protocol, just with different tools.

I wish there were an open source hex editor like Hex Workshop for Windows - one of the features I loved was tagging a section of bytes with comments, and being able to use those same tags across multiple data dumps.


Particularly handy for USB on Linux is the 'usbmon' module. Which when used with a kernel that has debugfs support, you can mount debugfs and use a new enough Wireshark to monitor the USB traffic.

http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/USB


You could write your own by extending OSS like hexdump or hexcurse or any other hex editor. It shouldn't be to big a deal to add that functionality. It's just beautiful what you can do with open source code! Don't forget to share.




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