Today, we are proud to present QCSuper, an open-source tool that will enable you to passively capture raw 2G/3G/4G frames produced by your rooted Qualcomm-based Android phone or dongle, and produce a PCAP analyzable using Wireshark (in addition to a couple other input/output formats). I have discovered that most USB dongles with a Qualcomm processor exposed a special diagnostic protocol, called Diag (or DM, or QCDM – for Qualcomm Diagnostic monitor).But I have also discovered that this proprietary protocol was also present inside Android phones (through a device called /dev/diag) and it allowed a couple good things, such as obtaining raw captures of network air traffic or, in older models, reading/writing at arbitrary offsets of the radio chip’s memory (!).

Lately, I have been playing with a 3G dongle – a small USB device enabling to connect to the mobile Internet. This helps a wider audience understand these underlying technologies and experiment first hand with these networks. Please note that this article is written to simplify and abstract many complex technical aspects.

Packet sniffing tool