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NatSci 802.11x WiFi Tracker Zeroes In On Users
securitas writes "Techweb reports that IT admins can now track and physically locate 802.11x WLAN users within a few feet using the new Wi-Fi Tracker hardware from National Scientific, based on its DarkStar wireless product. NSC's site says it will also produce tracking-only 'tag or badge' formats so admins are not limited to tracking active WLAN users and equipment. The company is now shipping development kits to its first customers and a technical specs PDF is available. The product incorporates Ekahau triangulation software. This is reminiscent of an earlier Slashdot story about office surveillance using 802.11b triangulation to track and determine the location of wireless network users."
This is really great news for all online gamers, because this allows games like features in this article further down the top page without losing all your money to your wireless provider.
Just imagine all the geeky reallife RPGs you can build using this technique!
There goes my plan to wardrive around my city next year and shamelessy exploit^H^H^H^H^H^Hassist the BitTorrent network.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
this dark star?
You must have a really cheap 802.11 if it's leaking electro-magnetic waves.
Does anyone with a little knowledge of 802.11b scanning know if ordinary wireless kit can be used to determine the signal strength to a given wireless node?
Triangulation is easy once you have the raw signal data, and this seems a fun hack to do this on the cheap with Linux HostAP over the holidays.
reminiscent of an earlier Slashdot
It's the new way to describe dupes for the new year. Let's live it up folks.
I'm tired of bombing the universe
Well, maybe my boss will be intrigued to discover that I am sitting on a couch using my laptop instead of sitting at a desk using my desktop; but I can think of interesting games that one can play with this kind of technology. I mean, if you hook this thing up to a wearable computer, first person shooters could be a lot more first person. Will companies be tracking the movement of wardrivers that normally track companies' bad security policies?
I wonder if we can put tinfoil hats on our 802.11 emitters?
And yes, I know.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
A bit like:
Office tracking as already in use.
Now I imagine the Gov't will start giving free Wi-Fi access just to have a little better big-brother type of hold on us here in the "land of liberty". *sigh*
12 posts and TechWeb (The Business Technology Network) is all but Slashdotted. And I actually did want to RTFA :-(
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
... that just had a vision of Igon walking around with a PKE meter searching for "hotspots".
...
Maybe I watched too many cartoons as a kid
I'm not an Electrical Engineer, but would this system be able to tell where I am located if I'm using something like a yagi or parabolic dish from several miles away?
What if I had a multi-antenna setup pointing my signal at different APs? To make the thing more confusing, what if I had attenuators or amplifiers on some of those antennas?
Looks like John Ashcroft got moderator points today
...that has no clue what he's talking about?
Maybe I ate too many paint chips and didn't watch enough cartoons as a kid....
National Scientific Corporation announced Tuesday that it's wrapped up work on its new WLAN hardware platform -- Wi-Fi Tracker -- which lets IT administrators pinpoint the position of wireless users and devices with accuracy within a few feet.
Hardware developer kits are now available to select early adopting customers, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company said.
First introduced in May, 2003, and touted at the Wi-Fi Planet Conference and Expo earlier in December, Wi-Fi Tracker is a spin-off from National Scientific's DarkStar wireless platform.
When combined with Ekahau, Inc.'s Positioning Engine software, the tracker 'tags' wireless assets accessing a standard 802.11x network to accurately display their location.
as soon as I find a rabbit to strap my wifi transmitter to, the mean bad guy will start tracking *it* instead of me, and I can get away with the suitcase full of non-circulating currency.
Whenever I have to write up presentations or work on code, I disappear to this place for hours at a time, but magically, work gets done (free wireless, and decent, if not super speedy, net connectivity). I think smart managers (I'm one of them) understand that sitting in a cubie 8 hours per day does not consitute "putting in a day's work." WiFi lets us be the most productive we can be, no matter where we are. Sometimes, that means leaving the office.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
The techweb article seems to imply that something would locate any wi-fi device, which would be nice for tracking down wireless misbehavior.
Did I miss something?
This system is good for tracking equipment already using WLAN, but for an alternate approach, check out Sonitor, which uses ultrasound instead of radio and has a tag battery lifetime of one year instead of 24 hours.
If you can imagine, that the company is enough security wise to deploy such solution to catch wardrivers, it probably employs other anti-hacking measures that among other things include strong authentication & encryption schemes (SSL tunneling, IPSEC, ...). Since traffic protected in such manner can be passively detected, one can imagine that wardrivers will simply proceed to the next mark, since they are merely trying yo exploit unsecured || weakly secured (WEP) networks.
Using this to catch wardrivers is as useless as killing mosquitos with elephant gun. Eventualy you get the job done, but it would be much cheaper and much more effective to simply buy a mosquito net.
You could use such solution in honeypot, but when caughtm the user could simply claim ignorance, as there are no "ether" signs preventing you from "accidentaly" connecting to AP is it is completely open to the world (left on default settings).
Anonymous Cowards Unite
I work in the mobile computing lab at Rutgers ( http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/dataman )
one of the projects I work on is indeed localization based. We were working on Berkeley's Mica MOTES and have an algorithm APS which can as the above poster stated use a relative coordianate system. However in reference to the article ranging based on signal strength is worthless (based on my own research and experience). Strength fluctuates too much to give a good equation for trianglulation. On the mote hardware the signal strength is a type decreasing amplitude sin function. So yes signal strength goes down as range increases but not cleanly. With a given strength you could be 5 feet, 13 feet or 35 feet away from the base station. This is probably not going to work very well in office use as metal also really screws with wireless signals (Anyone at MobiCom2003 see my APS demo there and wonder why the hell the board was proped up on coffee mugs? a metal band running around the table was carrying the radio signal around the damn table)
So in short I really doubt this will be a boon to wireless sys admins
combine this with photo/time databases and 802.11 enabled McDonalds would be able to give your photo to the RIAA, naa thats just the paranoia speaking...
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
It's funny how we Americans get so extreme about rights - it's not "I have a right, and so does he/she/it" - it's "I have this right, that right, and then some - all very unilateral. I live in the land of the free, halleluja!.
But sure, the corp. network is the corp's network, the building is corp's building, and so on. That doesn't mean that a toilet-timer or toilet-cam is appropriate, even if weren't outright illegal. You want to put it into perspective? How about a supply-room closet-cam to ensure that neither too many Post-It's get snarfed, nor any hanky-panky after the x-mas party goes on. Well, I hear sexual harassment suits can be costly, best to make sure. And don't forget the company non-dating policy, analysing proximity/location information would be excellent there - hasn't Joe been spending a lot of time around Susan, eh? And sometimes circles a little before, he's obviously indecisive then, and we don't want those kind of managers.
I think we're forgetting a very basic thing here. If you're worried about a device being used 'outside', then fine, worry about tracking the device - not the person. But the lowly card swipe/proximity-badge easily tells management what they need to know: Joe is at work, in the building, without knowing his lat/long. Joe's manager and surrouding staff will notice that Joe isn't there, even if Bob swipes Joe's badge for two days.
If that doesn't cut it for management, then the company has some interesting issues of trust to sort out. Spending time collecting, checking/auditing and sorting out noise ("the system alerted because policy X was violated", but Bob actually had a fully legitimate 4-eyes-only conversation with his boss in the parking lot, a.k.a. let's take a walk, we need to figure this one out).
And you guys actually cheered when the Berlin wall fell, didn't you? Yep, those KGB and Stasi people were horrible, what kind of government would keep tabs on the poor citizens like that.... we don't, of course, but the companies can, it's their airspace. Don't like it - take a hike.
This technology, coupled with MAC address filtering could easily allow a store to restrict the users of their free access point to users within the store.
So much for bringing your own food from home and parking outside the coffee shop for free wireless.
comment directly in my journal
Something tells me that the testing center is going to get one of these things real fast --
Testing Center Employee: "Excuse me sir, we have detected that you are using a Palm Pilot to access 'TestAnswers.com'"
Me: "Ah crap!" (Beeline for the door.)
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
All these infosystems are completing a really accurate model of the physical world in databases - a regular cyberspace, a la William Gibson. Tech is finding leaks in our assumptions of privacy, where we have always expected that our personal space was known only to us, not any browser. Tech protection of our personal space from being rendered as realtime info in cyberspace will go the way of copyprotection and the mysteries of subatomic space. Our only way to protect our privacy is through policy, executed in technology. As geeks, we can already see the rough Big Brother beast slouching towards Bethlehem. We must be among the first to reasonably demand laws and corporate policies that keep that beast from breathing down our necks. Flimsy as they are, privacy policies are all we've got. Let's make them universal now, before all our private info is just so much cat out of the bag.
--
make install -not war
Traditional triangulation is done with vectors, under the theory that two lines can only intersect at one point, and if a third vector line crosses at the same point then a checksum agrees the result.
So, while one access point saying "it could be 5, 13 or 35 feet away" is very little information, combining that with a second access point's information will draw another set of concentric circles, and there's going to be a limited number of intersect points. Add in a third set of circles and hope that the transmitter moves a little, and it's very possible to "lock on" to one coordinate and follow the nearest overlap point as it moves around.
What does this mean for US warships that use Wi-Fi?
Yes but looking at the article and the tech sheet it looks like an omnidirectional antenna which means that you can not to Angle of Arrival. So you can only rely on the signal strength of the transmitter. Getting the AoA of the received signal is a very nice bonus. Which they do not claim to be using (as far as I can find. Please tell me if I'm wrong because this is an interesting topic to me)
WiFi lets us be the most productive we can be, no matter where we are.
...but Slashdot does not.
Just imagine an angry sysadmin chasing down an unforunate warwalker with full intention of beating the crap out of him with a high-gain yagi antenna.
:) Hell, might be even more fun to hide single-board systems around hotspots and trigger them randomly, driving the admin mad.
Bicycle + iBook + Airport + Darkstar-equipped network = hours of fun
(yes, I know it's only short-range as of now, and that anyone advanced enough to install one of these would probably have a network reasonably protected against warwalkers, but consider the possibilities!)
It may sound scary, in terms of loss of freedom and micromanagement possibilities, but there are also benefits. Figuring out the best places to put antennas and the ability to track equipment inventory are some of the ways it can help us in our everyday jobs. The smart managers, as you point out, will tend to not micromanage their people into lower productivity.
Because I leech out of hours and no admin is working overtime I can assure u.
Them track me at 3 in the morning ? Dont make me laugh, I can always burst it.
I could always jam it or I could set up decoys.
Make sure to also check out finnish company Ekahau for 802.11* positioning.
Cool research. Good luck.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
They are not, i belive the product only uses signal strength. I was commenting on the fact the home project was being too complicated. With a system built from the ground up, and ment for a small locations using signal strength becomes pratical. But if your going to try messing around with out a degree don't plan on getting anything very accurate 'hackd' from parts. From my experience using two cheap low quality directional antenna is plenty for me and a friend to drive straight to our model rockets, we just fan out about 25 yards, get a bering on it with the compass from the two locations. Punch the figures in the computer to find the distance, then hop in the truck and drive right up to where they lay. If we are off a little and the rocket isn't right there, we whip out the antenna and use the traditional method of just walking toward the source. We rarely have to pull one back out, but then again the rocket is over 3ft tall and painted safty orange.