Getting Practical About Wireless Security, Part 1: Building a Wireless Sniffer with Perl

By Peter Seebach
2005-04-13


A Lightweight Program can Illustrate Wireless Security Issues and Techniques
This article, the first in a two-part report, reviews common issues of wireless security, and shows how to use open source software to suss out wireless networks, get information about them, and start recognizing common security problems.

One of the best ways to make sure information is kept secure is to broadcast it using a published standard, and to try to make sure the signal goes as far as possible. Right? Well, maybe that isn't the best strategy after all. Unfortunately for us, the convenience of wireless access to a network means that a lot of people use a wireless network, and that means that a lot of data is being broadcast in the clear.

In this article, I'll build a lightweight wireless sniffer that runs on open source software. You'll see how simple it is to interact with wireless networks. The information the sniffer collects offers some insights on key wireless security issues.

It's easy to underestimate the availability of wireless networks. During testing for this article, I had a recurring problem: my equipment kept accidentally picking up networks other than the ones I wanted to test. In fact, my laptop has found wireless networks to associate with while I'm traveling on the freeway! So, one obvious thing for a wireless network scanner to do is to identify the names and signal strengths of local wireless networks.

Tutorial Pages:
» A Lightweight Program can Illustrate Wireless Security Issues and Techniques
» Rough Consensus and Running Code
» Setting up the System
» Scanning for Networks
» Looking at a Specific Network
» Access to the Program
» Wrapping Things Up
» Resources


First published by IBM DeveloperWorks

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