Working with Wireshark

Once Wireshark has loaded, you should see the advertising packets streaming out from the selected BLE device at a regular interval, as shown in the image below:

One of the key benefits of WireShark as an analysis tool is that it understands the raw packet formats and provides human-readable displays of the raw packet data.

The main way to interact with BLE data packets is to select one of the packets in the main window, and then expand the Bluetooth Low Energy Link Layer treeview item in the middle of the UI, as shown below:

Clicking on the Advertising Data entry in the treeview will highlight the relevant section of the raw payload at the bottom of the screen, but also provides human readable information about the payload that can save you a lot of time trying to debug or reverse engineer a device.

We can see, for example, that the device is advertising itself as a Bluetooth Low Energy only device ('BR/EDR Not Supported'), with a TX Power Level of 0dBm, and a single service is being advertised using a 128-bit UUID (the UART service in this case).

Capturing Exchanges Between Two Devices

If you wish to sniff data being exchanged between two BLE devices, you will need to establish a connection between the original device we selected above and a second BLE device (such as an iPhone or an Android tablet with BLE capabilities).

The nRF-Sniffer firmware is capable is listening the all of the exchanges that happen between these devices, but can not connect with a BLE peripheral or central device itself (it's a purely passive device).

Scan Response Packets

If you open up nRF UART on an Android or iOS device, and click the Connect button, the phone or tablet will start scanning for devices in range.  One of the side effects of this scanning process is that you may spot a new packet in Wireshark on an irregular basis, the 'SCAN_REQ' and 'SCAN_RSP' packets:

The Scan Response is an optional second advertising packet that some Bluetooth Low Energy periperhals use to provide additional information during the advertising phase.  The normal mandatory advertising packet is limited to 31 bytes, so the Bluetooth SIG includes the possibility to request a second advertising payload via the Scan Request.

You can see both of these transactions in the image above, and the Device Name that is included in the Scan Response payload (since the 128-bit UART Service UUID takes up most of the free space in the main advertising packet).

For more information on Scan Responses and the advertising process in Bluetooth Low Energy see our Introduction to Bluetooth Low Energy Guide.

Connection Request

Once we click on the UART device in nRF UART, the two device will attempt to connect to each other by means of a Connection Request, which is initiated by the central device (the phone or tablet).

We can see this CONNECT_REQ in the timeline in the image below:

Write Request

Once the connection has been established, we can see that the nRF UART application tries to write data to the BLEFriend via a Write Request to handle '0x001E' (which is the location of an entry in the attribute table since everything in BLE is made up of attributes).

What this write request is trying to do is enable the 'notify' bit on the UART service's TX characteristic  (0x001E is the handle for the CCCD or 'Client Characteristic Configuration Descriptor'). This bit enables an 'interrupt' of sorts to tell the BLEFriend that we want to be alerted every time there is new data available on the characteristic that transmits data from the BLEFriend to the phone or tablet.

Regular Data Requests

At this point you will start to see a lot of regular Empty PDU requests.  This is part of the way that Bluetooth Low Energy works.

Similar to USB, all BLE transaction are initiated by the bus 'Main', which is the central device (the tablet or phone).

In order to receive data from the bus secondary (the peripheral device, or the BLEFriend in this particular case) the central device sends a 'ping' of sorts to the peripheral at a delay known as the 'connection interval' (not to be confused with the one-time connection highlighted earlier in this tutorial).

We can see pairs of transaction that happen at a reasonably consistent interval, but no data is exchanged since the BLEFriend (the peripheral) is saying 'sorry, I don't have any data for you':

Notify Event Data

To see an actual data transaction, we simply need to enter some text in our terminal emulator SW which will cause the BLEFriend to send the data to nRF UART using the UART service.

Entering the string 'This is a test' in the terminal emulator, we can see the first packet being sent below (only the 'T' character is transmitted because the packets are sent out faster than we enter the characters into the terminal emulator):

What this 4-byte 'Bluetooth Attribute Protocol' packet is actually saying is that attribute 0x001C (the location of the TX characteristic in the attribute table) has been updated, and the new value is '0x54', which corresponds to the letter 'T'.

Scrolling a bit further down we can see an example where more than one character was sent in a single transction ('te' in this case):

The results of this transaction in the nRF UART application can be seen below:

Closing Wireshark and nRF-Sniffer

When you're done debugging, you can save the session to a file for later analysis, or just close Wireshark right away and then close the nRF-Sniffer console window to end the debug session.

Moving Forward

A sniffer is an incredibly powerful and valuable tool debugging your own hardware, reverse engineering existing BLE peripherals, or just to learn the ins and outs of how Bluetooth Low Energy actually works on the a packet by packet level.

You won't learn everything there is to know about BLE in a day, but a good book on BLE, a copy of the Bluetooth 4.1 Core Specification and a sniffer will go a long way to teaching you most of the important things there is to know about BLE in the real world.