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."

Comments

Re:How much info? - Plenty

[necro2607]

To quote the book "Maximum Wireless Security" from Sams Publishing:

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:

• 
  
• Basic Service Set ID (BSSID)
  
• WEP-enabled or not
  
• Type of device: AP or peer
  
• MAC address of wireless device
  
• Channel device was heard on
  
• Signal strength of device
  
• Longitude and latitude (if using a GPS)
  

Re:Kismet Superiority

[necro2607]

Netstumbler won't report APs which aren't broadcasting their SSID in the beacon frame, whereas Kismet will. This makes a huge difference as many users are going to choose the option to make their AP "stealth" since they think it'll keep their AP hidden from "hackers" and war-drivers and the likes.