Live, system-wide USB transfer sniffer in eBPF
Details
- External ID
- 48342821
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Live, system-wide USB transfer sniffer in eBPF
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- May 31, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5516962843295639
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- systems tools and desktop utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Observability & eval
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- usb transfer monitoring tool using ebpf
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing an eBPF-based sniffer that taps Linux USB subsystems (usbmon/URB tracking) requires deep Linux kernel internals, low-level C programming, and eBPF verifier navigation that cannot be vibe-coded.
What it would actually take: The project requires writing Linux eBPF C programs attached to kernel tracepoints or kprobes within the USB core (such as usb_submit_urb and usb_giveback_urb). It requires a user-space driver in Go/Rust/C using libbpf to pull parsed URB buffers from BPF ring buffers, reassemble USB request blocks across various USB transfer types (Control, Bulk, Interrupt, Isochronous), and stream them to a terminal or Wireshark-compatible pcap pipe. This demands extensive expertise in Linux kernel subsystem internals, USB protocol standards, and eBPF memory safety constraints.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 811 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #364 of 812 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 212 days after the earliest competitor.
- Pdsink · hn · 2025-11-15 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- usbloom · github · 2026-09-20 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- U-Claw · hn · 2026-03-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- snapdrop · github · 2026-09-14 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Spliff · hn · 2026-01-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- ghost-location · github · 2026-09-13 · 69 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- afzoon · github · 2026-09-22 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Portview, A diagnostic-first port viewer for Linux (~930 KB, zero deps) · hn · 2026-02-08 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a observability & eval tool for Media & entertainment yet.