USB Sniffing
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To reverse engineer protocols of proprietary (flashing) USB devices one needs to obtain traces of the communication between the vendor application and the device. Below is a list of possible methods to do so.
usbmon - The Linux way
Capturing native Linux applications
Capturing virtualized applications
Most probably the proprietary device comes with a proprietary application running on a proprietary OS like Windows or OSX. By using a virtual machine we can nevertheless do the capturing and dissecting in Linux. The only difference here is that the virtual machine must support forwarding USB ports and traffic into the virtualized operating system in a way that usbmon can cope with.
USBPcap - Windows
On Windows hosts one can use USBPcap to capture USB traffic natively.
Wireshark supports dissecting USBPcap capture files since version 1.10.
bb_usb_sniffer - Using a BeagleBoard-xM as MITM
Another interesting way is to use an embedded Linux computer between the device and the host. This approach has been implemented using a BeagleBoard-xM [1].