Sniff Wi-Fi

Happy (belated) Cinco de Mayo!  In honor of Mexico (whose El Tri I actually like a heck of a lot less than Les Bleus ), today's discussion of Guerra de Conduccíon has a Spanish language title.   As noted by noted sarcastor Keith R. "The R Stands for Reassociation" Parsons , in some ways wardriving is a topic whose time has passed.  We've known about it for years.  Wardriving tells hackers where your network is.  Most WiFi networks are encrypted.  What else is there?  Hackers can try to connect, but if you use a long WPA2 Personal passphrase , they won't be able to.  Hackers can try to sniff, but if you're using WPA2 Enterprise, then decryption of data frames is impossible (as far as us non-NSA employees know). But imagine you are an NSA employee.  Or the CEO of a noted defense contractor .  Or holder of some other high-profile job where the nation's prosperity is dependent on your secrecy (like USC's head football coach). ...

Ahh, the good ol' days.  The days when USC was beating UCLA by 50 points, AirTran was flying nonstops from LAX to Milwaukee and WiFi sniffing folks only had to carry one USB card for 802.11 protocol analysis.  Those days are gone, my friends.  It's time to update which cards we need for which applications. December of 2011 was a time yours truly looks back on with fond memories for the reasons cited above.  In the wireless world, the good news was that WildPackets OmniPeek had begun supporting monitor mode capture from Atheros-based 802.11a/b/g/n chipsets, thus allowing one USB adapter to be used for any good WiFi sniffing app. Things change, and when WLAN infrastructure vendors began selling APs that support three-stream spatial multiplexing (thus rendering high rate data frames un-sniffable to the D-Link DWA-160 802.11a/b/g/n USB adapter), the handwriting was on the wall.  The halcyon days of only needing one USB adapter for wireless protocol analysis we...