Packet Sniff Xbox 360 Network Traffic & Dashboard Updates with Wireshark

InsaneNutter

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Packet sniffing your Xbox 360 enables you to see what is going on when the Xbox 360 is communicating with the Xbox servers over the internet. So why would you want to do this? well one reason is you can obtain the dashboard updates which allows for beta updates to be achieved, you can also find out the address of streaming video on the 360 dashboard and download those too.

How to packet sniff your Xbox 360:

To packet sniff the Xbox 360 you will need:

  • A computer with two network connections, one can be wireless and wired or you can have two wired connections.
  • An Xbox 360 connected to the computer via a network cable

We are going to share your computers internet connection to the Xbox 360, this will allow us to run an application on the computer called Wireshark which can sniff the packets of data going over your computers network connections.

Setting up your computer to share the internet to the Xbox 360:

Go in to Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections and right click on your internet connection

360-packetsniff-1.png


Click properties, then on the sharing tab and tick "Allow other network users to through this computers internet connection"

360-packetsniff-2.png


When you click ok you should see the computer is sharing the internet connection to the network connection the 360 is connected to

360-packetsniff-3.png


Setting up Wireshark:

Download Wireshark from Wireshark.org

After you have installed Wireshark load it up and capture the packets (packet sniff) the network connection which is connecting the Xbox 360 to your computer, as can be seen in the screenshot below.

360-packetsniff-4.png


Once this is running connect to Xbox Live, update when asked to update your dashboard say yes and update as normal. The files the Xbox 360 requests and download will be logged as the packets of data are passing through your computer to the Xbox 360, allowing Wireshark to sniff and log them.

When the update process has finished you can stop logging. It would be a good idea to go File > Save and save all the captured packets.

360-packetsniff-5.png


If you click the "info" section section you can sort the data alphabetically, this makes it easier when finding files downloaded from the same location.

Now you can press CTRL + F, select string and filter by GET, this will find all the files the Xbox 360 requested to GET (download) when updating the dashboard.

Example:

360-packetsniff-7.png


You can see in the screenshot L.Dash.MP.LiveSignup.lex.media.xzp is located at /content/fffe07d1/files/0F2CD2F0AD4FA3445C04DE0750E417F004FCC5F8/L.Dash.MP.LiveSignup.lex.media.xzp to download this simply add
Code:
http://download.xbox.com
to the URL and you end up with:

Code:
http://download.xbox.com/content/fffe07d1/files/0F2CD2F0AD4FA3445C04DE0750E417F004FCC5F8/L.Dash.MP.LiveSignup.lex.media.xzp

Now you know how to get the link to a file you can copy + paste that link and download it with your web browser, a download manager or even wget on Linux.

You will have a lot of files you need to download if you want the avatar + kinect data, and here comes the tedious boring part. Click on each file you want to download in Wireshark, and press CTRL+M to "mark" it, you will need to do this 100+ times, however you can do this pretty fast by pressing CTRL+M, then the up arrow, followed by CTRL+M again... and so on, that should only take you a minute or two. I have no idea why you cant simply control + click on each bit of info you want to copy.

Example of selecting the info we want:

360-packetsniff-8.png


After you have done that, Go File > Print and select the options in this screenshot:

360-packetsniff-9.png


You will then end up with a text file that contains everything listed you need to download

360-packetsniff-10.png


Simply using the Edit > Replace function of notepad, or Find & Replace in Word / your favourite text editor. Doing this you can clean the data up pretty quickly.

Quick find and replace example:

Find: /content/
Replace with
Code:
http://download.xbox.com/content/

Find: " HTTP/1.1"
Replace with: "" (nothing) to simply remove it

End result:

360-packetsniff-11.png


Now using a download manager such as Getright or J-downloader you can simply download all the files for your packet sniffed dashboard update.

Putting your packet sniffed files to use:

I can only help you so much with this, I can get the basic update to install on an Xbox 360, however not the Avatar / Kinect data as more has to be done with that then just renaming some files.

To get the basic update working:

  1. Create a folder in the root of your Fat32 formatted USB drive called $SystemUpdate
  2. Rename suF58FDAA6CD316A7F566CBCA4E8609BCE7A0068CE.bin (the random numbers in-between will vary from update to update) to su20076000_00000000
  3. Place it in the $SystemUpdate folder and the Xbox 360 will ask your console to update when the USB drive is inserted (providing your 360 is on an older dashboard version)

Other stuff needs to be done to the other files which i'm unsure how to do 100% correctly, so the console will not install the avatars / kinect data with the update. You can update the dashboard perfectly fine however.
 

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