Bluetooth Sniffing History
Frontline has a strong appreciation for the importance of HCI sniffing because of the way we got involved with Bluetooth. Because of our company history, we are uniquely qualified to offer a multi-mode analyzer that provides many ways to sniff and supports a wide variety of protocols. This brief Bluetooth sniffing history should help you understand our approach to Bluetooth protocol analysis.
In the early days of Bluetooth, there were no commercially available Bluetooth protocol analyzers, so developers built their own debug tools and/or used protocol analyzers that weren’t built for Bluetooth. Many developers built homegrown HCI analyzers—basically hex dumps and crude traces—because they recognized the need for visibility into the HCI interface and because it was too difficult to build air sniffers. Several companies developed air sniffers because they saw a market need and because they realized that they could charge a high price (USD $25,000 and higher).
Two Bluetooth chip companies, Silicon Wave and Broadcom were using Frontline’s Serialtest® serial analyzer to capture serial HCI traffic and then they would manually decode the HCI byte stream. This manual decoding was far too much work and so, independently, Silicon Wave and Broadcom each requested that Frontline produce a serial HCI Bluetooth analyzer that would have all the features of Serialtest. In response to these requests Frontline developed SerialBlue®—the world’s first commercially available serial HCI analyzer.
The response to SerialBlue was very positive. When we asked our Bluetooth customers what they wanted next we quickly learned that there was a need for an affordable air sniffer that provided the same quality as SerialBlue. We also learned that the ultimate Bluetooth analyzer would be one that sniff air and sniff HCI simultaneously.
As work was progressing on our combination air sniffer and HCI sniffer the functional requirements for Bluetooth analyzers were changing. It was no longer good enough just to decode the core Bluetooth protocols (LMP, HCI, L2CAP, RFCOMM, and OBEX). Applications were beginning to be built on top of Bluetooth and therefore application level protocol decoding was becoming a requirement. For example, people were starting to browse the Internet using Bluetooth-enabled phones and PDAs therefore a good Bluetooth analyzer would need to support TCP/IP, HTTP, hands-free, A2DP, etc.
For Frontline to support for these higher levels protocols was no problem since they were already in use in other Frontline analyzer products. People have been using Frontline Serialtest serial analyzers and Ethertest™ Ethernet analyzer to troubleshoot TCP/IP and Internet problems for many years.
As we continued to work closely with the Bluetooth community we also came across one other requirement: sniffing itself had to be made easier. We took a two-pronged approach to this problem. We simplified air sniffing (and we continue to work on simplifying the process of air sniffing) and we invented Virtual sniffing.
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