Disclosed is a method of hardware and firmware debugging. The method includes coupling an interface sniffer to an interface of the hardware component on which firmware is running such that the interface sniffer captures a transaction on the interface that is associated with the hardware component, coupling, to the interface sniffer, a simulator including a reference model to receive the captured transaction by the simulator such that the captured transaction affects the reference model, and causing the internal state of the hardware component to be reproduced in the simulator based on the reference model affected by the captured transaction.