How to sniff a USB port under Windows?

windows usb sniffing usbserial
dpavlin picture dpavlin · Sep 22, 2008 · Viewed 88.5k times · Source

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.

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.

Answer

jamkomo picture jamkomo · Feb 20, 2011

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. Problem with the above? I don't know how the Linux machine or the Windows machine will detect each other.

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