Users of almost all software platforms have available many useful Wi-Fi software tools that allow Wi-Fi to perform functions such as:
• Wireless network discovery
• Wireless network mapping
• Wireless network traffic analysis
• Wireless network RF signal strength monitoring
• Wireless network encryption cracking
• Wireless network custom frame generation
• Dictionary or brute force attacks against wireless networks
• Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against wireless networks
Wi-Fi Software Tools for Multiple Platforms
Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng is a WEP and WPA-PSK key cracking program you can use on 802.11 networks. This program’s primary purpose is to recover a lost or unknown key once enough data is captured.
Aircrack-ng has the following advantages over the original Aircrack release:
• Updated and better documentation
• Updated drivers, including new drivers not originally supported in Aircrack
• New and faster WEP attack algorithm PTW
• Supports Unix, Windows, and Zaurus
• Includes fragmentation in attacks
• Better cracking performance
• Dictionary support for WEP attacks
• Use multiple cards to capture simultaneously
• New tools including airtun-ng, packetforge-ng (improved arpforge), wesside-ng (still under development), and airserv-ng (still under development)
• Code optimizations and bug fixes
Wi-Fi Software Tools for Windows
KNSGEM II
This program KNSGEM II, takes the survey logs produced by NetStumbler, Kismet, or WiFiHopper and compiles the data with google earth to provide colorized 3D coverage maps.
NetStumbler
NetStumbler for Windows allows you to detect Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) using 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g. It has many uses:
• Verify that your network is set up the way you intended.
• Find locations with poor coverage in your WLAN.
• Detect other networks that may be causing interference on your network.
• Detect unauthorized “rogue” access points in your workplace.
• Help aim directional antennas for long-haul WLAN links.
• Use it recreationally for WarDriving.
OmniPeek
Omnipeek is the next generation version of commercial wireless analysis software from wildpackets.
Features of OmniPeek:
• Analyze any network interface, including 10Gigabit, Gigabit, and WAN adapters
• Analyze media and data traffic simultaneously
• View results in normal document formats such as PDF, HTML or just through email or IM clients
• View high level details of traffic in a dashboard, or drill down into the individual packet payloads
• View local, remote, or previously stored captures, including view multiple active captures at once.
• View capture details by conversation pairs to quickly identify useful or problematic events
• Change capture filters at will without restarting the capture sequence
Stumbverter
StumbVerter allows you to import Network Stumbler’s summary files into Microsoft’s MapPoint 2004 maps.
The logged WAPs will be shown with small icons, their colour and shape relating to WEP mode and signal strength.
As the AP icons are created as MapPoint pushpins, the balloons contain other information, such as MAC address, signal strength, mode, etc. This balloon can also be used to write down useful information about the AP.
Lucent/Orinoco Registry Encryption/Decryption
Lucent Orinoco is a Client Manager that stores WEP keys in the Windows registry under a certain encryption/obfuscation. This wi-fi tool can be used to encrypt WEP keys into a registry value or to decrypt registry values into WEP keys.
WiFi Hopper
WiFi Hopper is a windows network discovery and connection client.
WiFi Hopper can assist auditors with Site Surveys, Connection parameter testing, and Network Discovery. You can easily limit the details displayed, as well as what kinds and configurations of equipment will be tested, using filters
APTools
APTools queries ARP Tables and Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) for MAC Address ranges associated with 802.11b Access Points. It utilizes Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) if available. If an Access Point that is web managed is identified, the security configuration of the Access Point is audited via HTML parsing.
Wi-Fi Software Tools for Unix
AirSnort
It is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool used to crack encryption keys on 802.11b WEP networks. AirSnort passively monitors transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered.
CoWPAtty
CoWPAtty is a program that utilized look up tables to optmize brute force key cracking for shortest time. The hash tables provides include 100,000 dictionary and common key words with the top 1000 most common WiFi SSIDs. Its focus is on the WPA1 and WPA2 protocols.
Karma
Karma is a set of compiled wireless client assessment tools. It is used to identify and take advantage of methods operating systems use to connect to access points. Although no exploit codes are provided with the code release, the suite has been tested with multiple exploit releases.
Kismet
Kismet is an 802.11 Layer 2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and Intrusion Detection System. It will work with any wireless card that supports a raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic.
Identify networks by passively collecting packets and detecting standard named networks, detecting and decloaking hidden networks, and inferring the presence of nonbeaconing networks via data traffic.
Wellenreiter
Wellenreiter, by Max Moser, is a GTK/Perl program that makes the discovery and auditing of 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless networks much easier. All three major wireless cards (Prism2, Lucent, and Cisco) are supported. It has an embedded statistics engine for the common parameters provided by wireless drivers. Its scanner window can be used to discover access-points, networks, and ad-hoc cards. It detects SSID broadcasting or non-broadcasting networks in every channel. The manufacturer and WEP is automatically detected. A flexible sound event configuration lets you work in unattended environments. An ethereal / tcpdump-compatible dumpfile can be created for the whole session. GPS is used to track the location of the discovered networks immediately. Automatic associating is possible with randomly generated MAC address. Wellenreiter can reside on low-resolution devices that can run GTK/Perl and Linux/BSD (such as iPaqs). Uniq Essod-bruteforcer is now included too.
Airsnarf
Airsnarf is a simple rogue wireless access point setup utility designed to demonstrate how a rogue AP can steal usernames and passwords from public Wi-Fi hotspots. Airsnarf was developed and released to demonstrate an inherent vulnerability of public 802.11b hotspots–snarfing usernames and passwords by confusing users with DNS and HTTP redirects from a competing AP.
Hotspotter
Hotspotter passively monitors Wi-Fi networks for probe request frames to identify the preferred networks of Windows XP clients, and will compare it to a supplied list of common hotspot network names. If the probed network name matches a common hotspot name, Hotspotter will act as an access point to allow the client to authenticate and associate. Once associated, Hotspotter can be configured to run a command, possibly a script to kick off a DHCP daemon and other scanning against the new victim.
BSD-Airtools
bsd-airtools is a package that provides a complete toolset for wireless 802.11b auditing. Namely, it currently contains a bsd-based wep cracking application, called dweputils (as well as kernel patches for NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD). It also contains a curses based ap detection application similar to netstumbler (dstumbler) that can be used to detect wireless access points and connected nodes, view signal to noise graphs, and interactively scroll through scanned ap’s and view statistics for each. It also includes a couple other tools to provide a complete toolset for making use of all 14 of the prism2 debug modes as well as do basic analysis of the hardware-based link-layer protocols provided by prism2’s monitor debug mode.
WaveStumbler
WaveStumbler is console based 802.11 network mapper for Linux.
AirFart
AirFart is a wireless tool created to detect Wi-Fi devices, calculate their signal strengths, and present them to the user in an easy-to-understand fashion. It is written in C/C++ with a GTK front end. Airfart supports all wireless network cards supported by the linux-wlan-ng Prism2 driver that provide hardware signal strength information in the “raw signal” format (ssi_type 3). Airfart implements a modular n-tier architecture with the data collection at the bottom tier and a graphical user interface at the top.
AirTraf
AirTraf is one of the first wireless 802.11(b) network analyzers. With the growth of interest in wireless networks, network administrators of today are faced with a challenge. The challenge is to effectively deploy numerous access points within their organization to provide wireless coverage for all users, and at the same time make sure that everyone who is granted access is able to operate in a fast, robust network environment.
AirTraf is a 100% passive packet sniffing tool for the wireless 802.11b networks. It captures and tracks all wireless activity in the coverage area, decodes packets, and maintains acquired information associated by access points, as well as detected individual wireless nodes. It dynamically detects any access points in the area, finds association between wireless clients and access points, and builds information table for each packet that is transmitted via the air. AirTraf is able to maintain packet count, byte information, related bandwidth, as well as signal strength of nodes.
And best of all, its open-source, and distributed under the GPL. Other comparable products that perform wireless network analysis price their products above $10,000 (such as Sniffer Wireless), and is limited to single-licenses of copy, while AirTraf can be installed at any detection location you choose, enabled to run in (Server Mode), and polled periodically via the polling server to retrieve active wireless data from multiple stations at once, resulting in consolidation of wireless information over your entire organization into a single point of access (database), and able to be administered via a web interface, visualizing your wireless network performance in a single glance. At absolutely no cost to you, or your organization.
However, AirTraf is still a work in progress, meaning much of planned features, such as injecting packets into the network to test Access Point security, are not available yet. But it is constantly being worked on, and soon it will prove to be a critical tool in managing healthy wireless networks in the future.
AP Hunter
AP Hunter (Access Point Hunter) can find and automatically connect to whatever wireless network is within range. AP Hunter can be used for site surveys, writing the results in a file.
AP Radar
AP Radar (Access Point Radar) is a Linux/GTK+ based graphical netstumbler and wireless profile manager. This project makes use of the version 14 wireless extensions in linux 2.4.20 and 2.6 to provide access point scanning capabilities for most models of wireless cards. It is meant to replace the manual process of running iwconfig and dhclient. It makes reconfiguring for different wireless access points quick and easy.
Mognet
Mognet is a simple, lightweight 802.11b sniffer written in Java and available under the GPL. It features realtime capture output, support for all 802.11b generic and frame-specific headers, easy display of frame contents in hex or ASCII, text mode capture for GUI-less devices, and loading/saving capture sessions in libpcap format.
PrismStumbler
Prismstumbler is a wireless LAN (WLAN) discovery tool which scans for beaconframes from access points. Prismstumbler operates by constantly switching channels and monitors any frames received on the currently selected channel.
Prismstumbler is designed to be a flexible tool to find as much information about wireless LAN installations as possible. It comes with an easy to use GTK2 frontend and is small enough to fit on a small portable system. Because of its client-sever architecture the scanner engine may be used for different frontends. An example for this is gpe-aerial, a wireless LAN access tool for GPE.
The current GTK user interface is designed to work on large PC screens as well as on PDA displays. Prismstumbler uses an embedded SQL database to store network information. It is also able to create networks lists in GPSdrive format and store captured packages to pcap dump files.
THC WarDrive
THC-WarDrive is a tool for mapping your city for wavelan networks with a GPS device while you are driving a car or walking through the streets. It is effective and flexible, a “must-download” for all wavelan nerds.
Wifi-Scanner
Wifi-Scanner is a tool that has been designed to discover wireless nodes (i.e access point and wireless clients). It is distributed under the GPL License.
WiFi-Scanner will work with Cisco cards and prism cards with the hostap driver or wlan-ng driver.
An IDS (Intrusion Detection System) is integrated into Wifi-Scanner to detect anomalies like MAC usurpation.
WaveMon
wavemon is a ncurses-based monitor for wireless devices. It allows you to watch the signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration, and network parameters of your wireless network hardware.
WPM (Wireless Power Meter)
WPM (Wireless Power Meter) is intended to give you a nice signal strength meter for analyzing your wireless connection, and facilitate setting up point-to-point links.
asleap
asleap exploits weaknesses in Cisco’s LEAP protocol. Specifically, asleap:
Recovers weak LEAP passwords.
Can read live from any wireless interface in RFMON mode.
Can monitor a single channel, or perform channel hopping to look for targets.
Will actively deauthenticate users on LEAP networks, forcing them to reauthenticate. This makes the capture of LEAP passwords very fast.
Will only deauth users who have not already been seen, doesn’t waste time on users who are not running LEAP.
Can read from stored libpcap files, or AiroPeek NX files (1.X or 2.X files).
Uses a dynamic database table and index to make lookups on large files very fast. Reduces the worst-case search time to .0015% as opposed to lookups in a flat file.
Can write *just* the LEAP exchange information to a libpcap file. This could be used to capture LEAP credentials with a device short on disk space (like an iPaq), and then process the LEAP credentials stored in the libpcap file on a system with more storage resources.
anwrap
anwrap.pl is a wrapper for ancontrol that serves as a Dictionary attack tool against LEAP enabled Cisco Wireless Networks. anwrap traverses a user list and password list attempting authentication and logging the results to a file. anrwap really wrecks havoc on RADIUS calls to NT networks that have lockout policies in place, you have been warned. Tweak the Timeouts, a lengthy LEAP timeout on the Cisco side could make for a very boring afternoon. anwrap was designed to audit authentication strengths before deploying LEAP in a production environment.
AirJack
AirJack is a device driver (or suite of device drivers) for 802.11(a/b/g) raw frame injection and reception. It is meant as a development tool for all manor of 802.11 applications that need to access the raw protocol.
Fake AP
Black Alchemy’s Fake AP generates thousands of counterfeit 802.11b access points. Hide in plain sight amongst Fake AP’s cacophony of beacon frames. As part of a honeypot or as an instrument of your site security plan, Fake AP confuses Wardrivers, NetStumblers, Script Kiddies, and other undesirables.
Wireless Access point Utilities for Unix
Wireless Access Point Utilites for Unix is a set of wi-fi utilities to configure and monitor Wireless Access Points under Unix using SNMP protocol. Wireless Access Point Utilities compiles by GCC and IBM C compiler and runs under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOS-X, AIX, QNX, OpenBSD.
AP Hopper
AP Hopper is a program that automatically hops between access points of different wireless networks. It checks for DHCP and Internet Access on all the networks found. It logs successful and unsuccessful attempts.
APTools
APTools is a utility that queries ARP Tables and Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) for MAC Address ranges associated with 802.11b Access Points. It will also utilize Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) if available. If an Access Point that is web managed is identified, the security configuration of the Access Point is audited via HTML parsing.
GpsDrive
GpsDrive is a car (bike, ship, plane) navigation system. GpsDrive displays your position provided from your NMEA capable GPS receiver on a zoomable map, the map file is autoselected depending of the position and preferred scale. Speech output is supported if the “festival” software is running. The maps are autoselected for best resolution depending of your position and can be downloaded from Internet. All Garmin GPS receiver with a serial output should be usable, also other GPS receiver which supports NMEA protocol.
Wifitap
WifiTap allows users to connect to Wifi networks using traffic injection. The concept is the same as most “man-in-the-middle” or “monkey-in-the-middle” attacks. For WifiTap to work, another system must have an association with an access point that the WifiTap system wants to pass traffic through.
Wi-Fi Software Tools for Mac OS
MacStumbler.
MacStumbler is a utility to display information about nearby 802.11b and 802.11g wireless access points. It is mainly designed to be a tool to help find access points while traveling, or to diagnose wireless network problems. Additionally, MacStumbler can be used for “wardriving”, which involves co-ordinating with a GPS unit while traveling around to help produce a map of all access points in a given area.
KisMAC
KisMAC is a free stumbler application for MacOS X, that puts your card into the monitor mode. Unlike most other applications for OS X we are completely invisible and send no probe requests. KisMAC supports third party PCMCIA cards with Orinoco and PrismII chipsets, as well as Cisco Aironet cards.
Kismet
Kismet is an 802.11 Layer 2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and Intrusion Detection System. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic.
Kismet identifies networks by passively collecting packets and detecting standard named networks, detecting (and given time, decloaking) hidden networks, and inferring the presence of nonbeaconing networks via data traffic.
Windows tools useful when associated with Wi-Fi tools
MacIdChanger
MacIdChanger allows you to easily and temporarily change the MAC Address of your windows network adapter without much fuss. This is generally used to conceal the unique mac id that is on every network adapter. This software only operates on Windows XP/2003.
Technitium MAC Address Changer
Free, and very verbose and functional tool to change your network adapters MAC Address. The tool works regardless of which network adapter or driver is installed in your system. Supported platforms are Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Additional Reading on Wi-Fi Software Tools