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Wi-Fi in the Sky
mindless4210 writes "In an attempt to have the greatest warflying run to date, members from Daily Wireless, Tom's Hardware, SoCalWUG, and Highlands Highspeed teamed up for an amazing two-plane mission around Southern California. They picked up over 3000 access points and 900 clients, established a point to point link between the two planes, and successfully video conferenced in real time over the connection. This is also the first time that the wireless network detection tool Kismet has been taken up in the air, reporting over twice as many APs as NetStumbler. There is some footage of the flight in divx format available here."
How much information can they REALLY gather from flying overhead? I assume that those planes travel as speeds > 85mph. Given the range of most APs, and the altitude of the plane, wouldn't they only be in range for a couple of seconds?
... With Dimonds?
I could swear we've seen something like this a few months ago!
Remember to lock down wifi network ASAP
Linux with kernel panic...
MadPenguin.org
All members of the wifi mapping team were arrested under charges involving suspicion of terrorist activities.
I'm going to go on a roadtrip from the East Bay heading north. My friends will be taking a second car, and we've already decided to set up a link between us for the trip (can you say deathmatch?) - but I need to pick up a pair of GPS units on the cheap. Does anyone have a recommendation for a cheap, gpsd compatible unit?
Our access point is protected with the Patriot Missle Defense System. Offenders are liable to be shot down.
Your Friend,
D. McBride.
...it's just of some cherokee flying around, nothing special.
This is also the first time that the wireless network detection tool Kismet has been taken up in the air, reporting over twice as many APs as NetStumbler.
;-)
This week I realized how much better (like we needed proof) Kismet is over Netstumbler, even the newly released version
Had to fly to our San Francisco office and do some "networking stuff". Stayed in the Hyatt on Embarcadaro, where ironically they were hosting SecureIT 2004...make sure you use ' or ''=' to login to the Hyatts wi-fi service as admin for free.
Anywho, did some wireless sniffing with my "Cantenna" and on average picked up two to three times as many APs/Peers with Kismet than Netstumbler. Same equip on a dual booting laptop.
Many Access Points have the ability to be configured in a stealth mode, thus "disabling the beacon" as one of their options. In reality, the beacon frame is still sent every 100 milliseconds--only the SSID has been removed.
Information made available by a single beacon frame, one of which is sent 10 times a second:
Will they ever learn? Anything but plain text fed to ./ will turn your server into a heap of molten destruction. . . . .
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
..the Dailywireless team had a higher powered antennas.
So the the article is little biased when it says kismet picked up more. Sure it has the ability to catch cloaked SSID's but having a high powered antenna is definite boost towards gathering more info about access points.
..But that was a different person doing something like this over the same area. See here.
And yes it's
Do radio signals leave behind a 'trail'? I mean, if... Say its got a 100ft radius, and you were flying (or driving) ahead of me... I was following... at 120ft... would I pick up the 'trail'? Would communication be possible? Or does that circular 'radius' follow you?
-Imidazole
Hilarious Office Prank!
This is also the first time that the wireless network detection tool Kismet has been taken up in the air, reporting over twice as many APs as NetStumbler.
I had this installed on my laptop last week when flying from LAX to PHX. Granted, I did not do much scanning, but their's was not the first flight of the application.
As I've had in my .sig you can fly, too. The hardest part is starting. Go to your nearest airport and take the $49 demo flight.
Be A Pilot has all of the info. Other great resouces are AOPA and EAA.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
As a starting point, the WaveSEC homepage describes a way to secure a wireless network entirely using IPsec, without relying on WEP. In addition, for a small home network you can get away with static IP addressing instead of using DHCP, and in this way you can gain all the benefits of WaveSEC security without needing any software patches (since if you look closely all the software patches are DHCP related).
IPsec is supported in Windows 2000 and up, Linux 2.6 (natively) or 2.0 and up (with Free S/WAN patches), and FreeBSD; unfortunately I have no firsthand knowledge of MacOS support. The main drawback of IPsec is that it is a very complicated protocol and takes a lot of effort to set up. Making different systems interoperate with each other is especially challenging -- for this task, I recommend the Free S/WAN interop page which links to an eclectic pile of guides covering most of the possible combinations.
My own home wireless network is a mix of Linux and Windows XP clients all connected via IPsec, and I have much more confidence in its security than I would otherwise have with WEP.
Anyone else find it amusing that there are over 3 times as many APs as there are clients. I guess the clients wouldn't be running all the time though so maybe it was bad timing.
Wait, nevermind! All of the unsecured AP's must just be Mom & Pop coffee shops offering free nodes. Right, must be it.
While sitting at my coffee table, Kismet shows 4 wireless networks available (without an external antenna) and each of these networks has WEP enabled, the message must be getting through to some people!
I know absolutely nothing about Microsoft's WI/FI API, but imagine a virus that spreads throughout the mess (er, mesh) created by the unsecured wireless networks. Hmm... and if the virus is smart enough to determine the WAP's manufacturer, it could even use the default admin password to blow massive holes in the router's firewall as well. While it's not very likely in my geographic location, it could definately be feasible in more densely populated areas.
Oh, and kudos to Kismet for blowing NetStumbler out of the water!
-- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!
dailywireless.org is the real daily wireless, after they had sucess in gaining ad $$ dailywireless.com snagged the .com name and wont release it, dailywireless cant afford to persue the issue because now its ad dollars are being stolen
I have made a mirror of the movie so you can spare Tom's the bandwidth.
|/usr/games/fortune
That's a pretty pointless video clip.
It was a single plane flying over the San Francisco bay area. I used Kismet as well... I think I wasn't the first but I did beat these guys by a long shot.
Two photos here:
kismet photo, San Francisco.
We had an ibook scanning as well, it picked up about 1/10th of the networks. All in all without very good equipment (knoppix, old kismet, nothing special) we got about 190 networks.
It's possible with a good antenna to circle and get online, it's also possible to make cell phone calls if you should feel like it (not that we did that). We were flying at about 2000 feet for most of the time.
It wasn't the last time we did it either. War flying can be fun with a GPS that records the altitude as well as the lat+long.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Nevermind how much info they can gather, but rather, how are they going to mark the sidewalk?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
As a pilot myself, I've got to say that these guys didn't exactly have their heads screwed on straight the day they went to do this. You couldn't PAY me enough to fly formation with another pilot whom I didn't know well, and someone obviously wasn't being too careful if doors are popping open. The wi-fi transmitters probably aren't that big of a deal, but I believe it may still be illegal, and I'd hate to do have all that gear running without a decent idea of what it was going to do to my avionics. Overall, a stunt like this does little to advance any sort of "science", and probably wasn't worth the risk to the 4 lives involved
-JT
Did they post a list of the WAPs they found anywhere? They flew right over my place and I want to know if they saw mine!
to put an anti-aircraft defense system on my roof.
I've personally taken my Powerbook 17' w/ integrated 802.11g up in a friend of mine's plane (Grumman American) and was able using kismac for 10.3 (OS X) to pick up some faint wireless base stations, nothing strong enough to actually forge a connection. We had to be flying reasonably slow, and low but it did work. I also had a 802.11 connection going to another laptop, but it was in the co-pilot's seat.
as W.E.P stands for "Wired Equivalence Protocol".
It was never designed to be any more secure than copper, which we all know is secure against packet sniffers (NOT!).
IPsec is the best and most general way to secure wireless networks.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
I'm more than willing to fight to the last drop of Tom's blood for this project.
How do we know it's first?
.. I'm sure many people have tried Kismet on the plane seeing as so many people use laptops.
Others may have done it and not reported
shut the fuck up with your spamming already. do you think tomshardware will get slashdotted? moron!!!
So there are a lot of WAP's open and unsecured. Big deal. Mine at home is open, by choice. I like the idea. If everyone had open WLAN's attached to ADSL/Similar, then I could go pretty much anywhere and access the net on my laptop. I would return the favour by paying fo a connection that other people could use in the same way. I like that world in my imagination where everyone allows access and so everyone has access. If it gets abused for spam I'll lock it down, yes I am a realist in a small way. Attack is not so much an isue as all the machines on th WLAN have firewall software.
The Dailywireless plane contained two laptops. One laptop was running Kismet, whereas the other one was running netstumbler.
...and nothing about a beowulf cluster? Come on people!
I'm not terribly familiar with Wi-Fi yet, but won't ubiquitous, anonymous, free Internet access lead to more problems with trolls, harassment, and other forms of web and email garbage? I know Wi-Fi can be locked down, e.g. my university requires that you register your NIC with the campus before obtaining access. But don't all these war driving/flying expeditions show that many if not most Wi-Fi is not yet secure?
I did some research while ago, wether warwalking/wardriving is legal here in Finland. Surprisingly I found section from the radio law that states receiving transmissions that weren't intended to you directly are illegal to receive. Meaning if you don't own the accesspoint or have legal access to it, you can be sentenced with this law, and the sentence goes up to 2 years in prison. That makes warwalking pretty extreme sports if there's someone who wants to try if this law holds in court.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
In the conclusions of the article they state that: "If standard, off-the-shelf wireless hardware is capable of performing these same tasks and why is it so expensive?"
-Probably because they didnt achieve air-to-ground communication. They only achieved communication between two objects moving in parallel at the same speed, which is equal to communication between two stationary objects. RF communication standards are made to operate up to a certain speed, which range from "walking" (for Bluetooth) to "highway" (for GSM). If the speed is larger the doppler-shift may disrupt the radio link. And when we are talking of commercial airlines the speeds are rather large, which demands that this is taken into account when designing the system specs.
(And yes, WLAN has been shown to operate at high speeds, eg. Porshe at full throttle, but I dont remember if it were a standard system.)
What does this prove ? We all know Wi-Fi is as insecure as Windoze. What did they hope to demonstrate with this ? I cannot help thinking that they did not really think this through.
A friend and I have the same 1 watt amp, nearly the same antennas, he runs NetStumbler and I run Kismet. I routinely get 30-50% more networks in tandem social-stumbling (which is a lot of fun, btw, and it helps to have a navigator for doing targeted drives).
We haven't done one since NetStumbler 0.4 came out, however, which is more active in its searching. Initial reports indicate that it does do quite a bit better now than it used to.
-- bobzilla
Wireless Geographic Logging Engine
I would like to say that un-like the other two
post I think that was freaking awsome and can't wait to get my commercial fixed wing liscence and do the same thing.
Anyone that post about the avaonics messing with equipment or "flying in formation" as being dangerous has not idea what they are talking about, and have probably never be in an Airplane besides a huge jet.
Flying in formation dosen't mean you have to fly 3-4 feet like the fucking blue angles. You can fly 100's of feet from each other as long as you are maintaining the same heading, speed, and distance away from the other airplane.
People also forget that Wireless equipment is line of sight, so by being in a airplane you can see more AP's then by driving alone, not to mention that is saves more time.
I think it all boils down to jelousy and ignorance. These people can't own or see owning a plane, so they think that any one that does is a moron, and that flying in a plane to find Wireless AP's is a waste of time..
If those out there have the money and the resources to fly a fucking plane for wireless access points let them do it. This is a free country (moslty) and economics will punish them if they can't afford to do these things. (I.E. they will go bankrupt because the money that went for place fuel was suppose to go to power.)
If they can do it, and want to do it.
More power to you!
Exactlly,
This is what no politican wants to admit.
We have the technology to have flying vehicles
that could be afforded by at least the upper middle
class.
However, one must sacrafice lots of time to train, or saftey and logistical capability.
It's isn't the only reason we don't have flying cars yet. But condsider people still forget do things as simple as change the oil, or they wreck when they are watching the radio, the question boils down too.
Why you want EVERY 16 year old girl or Guy, or how about every 75 year old lady driving a flying car? Or even a drunk redneck coming home from the bar?
Cars ARE lethal weapons, so much energy and cause so much distuction. But we can some what control what cars hit, by putting barriers, railing, and having populated areas away from the streets, or speed limits exteremly low, speed bumps, speed islands etc..
But imagine a car, that could fall into anyones house, hospital, gasoline tank, anything...
We won't see flying cars for the public in a long long time. (Probably never.) What we will see though are more upper classed indviduals getting licsesed to fly in helicopters and airplanes. ANd many, many more charter services that fly people 50 or 60 miles in 1/2 hour or so for next to nothing. (I'm talking 20 years off or so.)
That really is the most pointless, useless video ever. Even worse for it being on some kind of computing website.
Sorry Tom's but copying Arstechnica articles without adding anything worthwhile doesn't cut it these days.