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

By Peter Seebach
2005-04-13


Access to the Program
It'd be nice to have a program like this associated with a user account so that someone could connect to the box (whether on console, over a serial port, or through the network) and just have this display up. One caveat is that the wiconfig program requires superuser privileges to scan for networks. Just scanning whatever network the card is associated with doesn't require such privileges, but trying to probe for networks does.

However, making a user account with uid 0 and this program as a shell, while risky, is probably not quite as risky as giving everyone the root password to let them run it! Listing 5 shows the password file entry I used:

Listing 5. A password file entry.

probe:ZUOoIfQE48SZo:0:20::0:0:The probe thing:/home/probe:/home/probe/probe

All this code does is create an account with the user name probe that does nothing but run this little script. The account is accessible through ssh or by login from the console. All it does, for now, is run the script, giving status updates (however trivial) on the network.

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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