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Wifi Spy

Sniff Wifi traffic, log device addresses.

Uses Pcapy to capture packets. It's probably the best mantained out of many libraries wrapping the somewhat definitive packet capture library libpcap.

Uses Dpkt to interrogate and extract data from each packet. It's one of two popular packet manipulation libraries, the other being Impacket, which I had less luck with.

The other notable library in this space is Scapy.

Running

There's two different sets of configuration for Mac OS and Linux in wifispy.py, you'll have to comment out the appropriate set before running. I've only been able to make it work on Linux so far.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ sudo python wifispy.py

Needs to be run with sudo because we're doing system-level stuff. For the same reason pcapy won't work within a virtual environment.

Approach

  1. Put card into monitor mode. This means it will passively sniff all wireless traffic it sees. It differs from the somewhat similar promiscuous mode, which (as I understand it) gives you more information, but requires you to be connected to a network. Not all cards support monitor mode. This is done via a terminal command, as it doesn't seem possible through Python.

  2. Rotate channels. There are 13 channels in the 2.4GHz band, which are the most commonly used. There are also a number of others in the 5GHz range, but not all cards support these channels. Since cards can only be tuned to one channel at a time, we need to randomly switch channels in the background to ensure we're picking up devices using any channel. This is also done via a terminal command. Note that the nature of this process means we will miss some (many) packets, but for our purposes that shouldn't be a problem.

  3. Sniff packets using Pcapy. Each packet recieved goes into a function for processing.

  4. Process sniffed packets using Dpkt. Each first needs to be decoded. Using a Radiotap decoder means we can access 'pseudo-headers' which are inserted by the card rather than having actually been transmitted. Radiotap is a standard for injecting/interpreting these, though what actual information ends up there is up to the card manufacturer. For example, one card I tested packets did not include any signal strength data.

  5. There are three types of wireless (aka. 802.11) packet: management, control, and data. Each differs in what information it contains. Extract the key fields from the Radiotap headers, and write these along with the current timestamp to an in-memory queue.

  6. In the background, periodically write everything from the queue to a SQLite database.

Unanswered questions

  • Very occassionally the error Key error: 1 10 gets printed to the console. I don't know why.
  • The logs show periodic exceptions (Key error: 127) from trying to parse some packets. This seems to happen more often when the card is tuned to channel 6, from what I can see. I suspect the source is some device broadcasting malformed packets on this channel, but I've not been able to confirm this.
  • I've derived a number for signal (in dBm), but it does not take into account how much noise there is, although that's probably relevant too.
  • I've not got this to work on OS X -- BSD-based systems use the /dev/bpf* devices, which Pcapy doesn't seem to be able to cope with. It doesn't look like Scapy supports it either, but it does seem to be being worked on.

Related projects

Articles

On the command-line

This is a list of commands I've found useful whilst working on this project.

Mac

You will need to use the airport command, so create a symlink:

$ sudo ln -s /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport /usr/local/bin/airport

Find out the names of your network interfaces:

$ ifconfig

The default Wifi interface appears to be named en0.

Select the channel you would like to sniff (here, channel 6):

$ airport en0 channel 6

See all the existing networks and their channels:

$ airport en0 scan

Put your card into monitor mode:

$ sudo tcpdump -i en0 -Ic1 -py IEEE802_11

If this has worked it will say so in airport en0 getinfo.

To take the card out of monitor mode:

$ sudo tcpdump -i en0 -Ic1

Sniff traffic and store in a pcap file:

$ sudo tcpdump -i en0 -I -pw output.pcap

Linux

Check what country the system thinks you're in. This will affect what channels you can use.

$ iw reg get

It should say country GB, but if not:

$ iw reg set GB

This will mean you get all possible UK frequencies when you:

$ iwlist wlan1 freq

Find out the names of your network interfaces:

$ ifconfig

The default Wifi interface appears to be named wlan1.

Select the channel you would like to sniff (here, channel 6):

$ iw dev wlan1 set channel 6

See all the existing networks and their channels:

$ sudo iwlist wlan1 scan

Put your card into monitor mode:

$ iw dev wlan1 set type monitor

If this has worked it will say so in iwconfig.

To take the card out of monitor mode:

$ iw dev wlan1 set type managed

Sniff traffic and store in a pcap file:

$ sudo tcpdump -i en0 -I -pw output.pcap