Getting Practical About Wireless Security, Part 1: Building a Wireless Sniffer with Perl
By Peter Seebach2005-04-13
Rough Consensus and Running Code
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The code used for this article is not particularly elegant. The focus is on building a simple front end to the standard utilities, producing data that is accessible as plain text for use from a serial console or remote login.
The target platform for the sample code is NetBSD running on a fairly small box, using a standard wireless card. The primary test platforms were a laptop using an Intersil Prism chipset, and a Soekris Systems Net4801 using an Atheros chipset. The bulk of the actual code is written in Perl, using the Curses module from CPAN to make a friendly interface.
If you plan to build a more serious or fully featured program, you would probably be better off using this code as a prototype rather than actually using any of the code directly. However, it does show how some of these tools go together. My use of threading was an experiment, and I leave it up to you to decide whether that experiment was a success.
This series describes the development of the sniffer from a fairly simple (and yet buggy) program into a more complete program with fewer bugs; the last version of the program is available for download from Resources.
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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