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I'm trying to reverse-engineer a BLE device that uses USB HID over GATT to communicate with the host. I can capture the traffic using usbpcap, but when loading the results into wireshark, the packets seem to contain the bytes representing the data that is going over the air (i.e. device descriptor), but the packets are not decoded according to USBHID protocol. Everything is decoded as USB, and only contain URB_INTERRUPT_IN, URB_BULK in/out and URB_CONTROL_OUT, while I'm looking for things like GET DESCRIPTOR Request/Response DEVICE. Is there an extra step I can take to get the packets formatted and parsed correctly?

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1 Answers

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There are a few characteristics in use. You have one characteristic which contains the Report Map. This is usually only read once when the device is paired. This map contains the layout/specification of the data which is later sent through the Report notifications. This is mostly "copy-paste" the specification from the USB spec into BLE.

Now, when you run HID-over-GATT and your Bluetooth controller talks to the Host over USB, what you will see in usbpcap is the ACL data which contains L2CAP data, which contains GATT data, which in turn contains the Report data for HID. Then the Bluetooth stack on the host will decode this and feed it into the kernel's HID parser.

I would suggest you to instead connect your HID-over-GATT device to an Android phone and then take a look at the HCI snoop log what happens, which is decodable in Wireshark (but it won't parse your HID data).