jopohl/urh

Universal Radio Hacker, or URH, is a desktop application for investigating wireless signals and the protocols that devices use to communicate over radio. If you have a Software Defined Radio (a type of hardware that can receive radio signals across a wide range of frequencies), URH gives you a graphical environment to record those signals, decode them into bits and bytes, and figure out what the data means. The project was presented at the Black Hat security conference and has also been the subject of academic research. The typical use case is reverse-engineering: you want to understand how a wireless device, such as a remote control, a smart plug, or a wireless sensor, communicates. URH handles the signal processing steps that are otherwise tedious to do manually. It can automatically detect the modulation scheme a signal uses, which is the method by which data is encoded onto radio waves, and then apply decodings to recover the raw data. It also provides tools to compare multiple captured messages side by side, letting you spot which parts of a signal change between transmissions and what those changes represent. Beyond analysis, URH includes a fuzzing component for testing how devices respond to modified or malformed messages, and a simulation environment for testing stateful protocols where the sequence of messages matters. These features are oriented toward security researchers who want to probe devices for weaknesses in their wireless communication. URH supports a wide range of Software Defined Radio hardware including HackRF, RTL-SDR, LimeSDR, AirSpy, BladeRF, and others. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. On Windows you can install it via a standard installer, on Linux and macOS it is available through package managers including pip, Homebrew, and several Linux distribution repositories such as Arch Linux, Fedora, and openSUSE. A Docker image is also provided. The project has a user guide PDF and a set of YouTube tutorial videos covering common tasks. Community members have published articles describing how URH was used to analyze and control burger restaurant pagers, clone 433 MHz remote controls, and investigate wireless blinds and keyboards.