Posts

WLANPiShark: Wireless Capture With a WLANPi on Windows

Image
*** Note this article is out of date. Please use the information on this page until I get this artcile updated:  https://github.com/WLAN-Pi/WLANPiShark2 *** One huge advantage that Apple Mac users have over owners of Windows 10 machines is the ability to perform a native 802.11 wireless packet capture direct from their built-in wireless NIC. This is extremely useful for wireless pros who want to take a quick over-the air-capture into Wireshark to analyze traffic for troubleshooting purposes. Windows users don’t have the luxury of this native wireless capture capability. In this article, we take a look at how we can use a WLANPi unit as an adapter to capture traffic over the air, straight into Wireshark on a Windows machine. With the WLANPi being powered from the USB of the laptop, this is a super convenient, portable and powerful capture method that gets Windows users a little closer to the capabilities of their cousins on Apple Macs. Background I’ve always felt really bad for

The 5GHz “Problem” For Wi-Fi Networks: DFS

Image
Wi-Fi networking provides us with 2 bands for the operation of wireless LAN networks: the 2.4Ghz band and the 5GHz band. The 2.4GHz band has a reputation of being something of a “sewer” of a band, due to its limited number of usable channels, the number of Wi-Fi devices already using the band, and the high levels of non-Wi-Fi interference that it experiences. Many wireless LAN professionals will generally advise that you put your “important stuff” on the 5GHz band whenever possible. 5GHz has far more channels available, a corresponding lower number of devices per channel, and generally suffers much lower non-Wi-Fi interference. However, beneath the headline of “2.4Ghz = bad, 5Ghz = good”, there lurks a shadowy figure that can be troublesome if you’re not aware of its potential impact: DFS. Background Wi-Fi networks operate in areas of RF spectrum that require no licence to operate. This is in contrast to many other areas of the radio spectrum that generally require some form of (p

802.11 Roaming Variations Cheatsheet

Image
I recently saw a very interesting post from Gjermund Raaen  about Fast Secure Roaming, where he discusses OKC and 802.11r. This reminded me of some roaming issues I had recently observed with OKC myself, which got me looking up information to refresh my memory on a variety of roaming methods and standards. While looking in to the issue, I came across a classic blog post from Andrew Von Nagy about 802.11 roaming. It provides a superb summary of various roaming and security methods. I've read the post several times in the past, but thought that I would really benefit from a summary of its content to act as a memory jogger, rather than reading through the whole document again. For me, things get a little hazy when I start trying to remember the intricacies of the differences between EAP session resumption, PMK caching, OKC and PMK. To save myself some time for the next time I go through this loop, I put together a summary (Cheatsheet) of the content of the roaming variations