Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Monitoring Wi-Fi airspace with Kismet
Kismet
is a Wi-Fi spectrum and traffic analyzer that relies on your Wi-Fi adapter's
ability to enter something called monitor mode. You should be aware that not all
adapters and drivers support this mode of operation. Your best bet is to look for
an adapter based on the
Atheros
chipset, but Kismet will try to detect and use any
adapter—just give yours a try and let others know about it on the Raspberry Pi
Since your Wi-Fi adapter will be busy monitoring the airwaves, you'll want to work
directly on the Pi itself with a keyboard and monitor, or log in to the Pi over a wired
connection. See the
Setting up point-to-point networking
section of
Chapter 5
,
Taking Your
Pi Off-road
, if you would like to set up a direct wired connection without a router.
We'll have to build Kismet ourselves from source code as the package in the
Raspbian repository is ancient. The following are steps to build Kismet:
1.
First, add some developer headers and code libraries that Kismet relies on:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libpcap-
dev libpcre3-dev libnl-3-dev libnl-genl-3-dev libcap-dev
libwireshark-data
2.
Next, download the Kismet source code from the project's web page:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ wget http://www.kismetwireless.net/code/kismet-
2013-03-R1b.tar.gz
3.
Now extract the source tree and build the software using the following
sequence of commands:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ tar -xvf kismet-2013-03-R1b.tar.gz
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cd kismet-2013-03-R1b
pi@raspberrypi ~/kismet-2013-03-R1b $ ./configure --prefix=/usr
--sysconfdir=/etc --with-suidgroup=pi
pi@raspberrypi ~/kismet-2013-03-R1b $ make
pi@raspberrypi ~/kismet-2013-03-R1b $ sudo make suidinstall
4.
The Kismet build process is quite lengthy and will eat up about an hour
of the Pi's time. Once it's finished, you may exit the source directory and
delete it:
pi@raspberrypi ~/kismet-2013-03-R1b $ cd .. && rm -rf kismet-2013-
03-R1b
