WIFI Adapter Packet Injection
[Students Name]
[Instructors Name]
_/07/2020.
Introduction
Questions on whether a specific WIFI card is capable of operating monitoring mode and packet injections, or what WIFI adapter is compatible with the most recent Aircrack-ng suite are two of the most commonly sought answers in the field of WIFI securities. A WIFI adapter which is capable of both monitoring mode and packet injection is rather important and inconsequential functionality to facilitate a successful WIFI hacking (Cholvi, 2019). Where wireless packet injection can also be understood as the spoofing of packets on a network infrastructure to always appear as if they are part of the common network communication stream.
An example of such an instance as this is throughout the sending deauthentication messages from a connected client to a third party outside the individual as if it was sent by the wireless router. As a result of this, the client is automatically disconnected from the router. Monitoring mode on the other hand is one od the six modes which a WIFI card can easily operate under. This mode allows for the capturing of network packets without the immediate need of associating it with the access point.
Performing a simple and basic WIFI adapter packet injection test to be used in determining whether or not my WIFI adapter is capable of injection can easily be accomplished with the use of Aireplay-ng. Aireplay-ng is an example of some of the greatest tools in cybersecurity which can be used in generating traffic intended for cracking WPA and WEP keys. Another great feature of the software solution is the deauthentication option which comes in handy a vast majority of the time.
To begin with, we first need to place the WIFI adapter in its monitoring mode with the use of the below command:
airmon-ng start wlan0
Depending on the platform being used different results will be noticed, for example, while use Kali Linux Operating System, a few errors may be witnessed. The immediate solution to this is that one may be required to kill the processes that Kali Linux is constantly complaining about.
Figure 1: Killing Kali Linux Errors
The next process will be to check whether the WIFI adapter in question is designed to support packet injection. This can be done with the use of the below command;
aireplay-ng -test wlan0mon
Figure 2: Checking Packet Injection Status
Additionally, to check on the current operating mode of the WIFI card, the below command is applicable in Kali Linux;
iwconfig
Anyone with an interest in wireless hacking will in doubt be in the market for a reliable wireless network adapter, which usually leads to the confusion of which adapter is the best. The Wireless USB adapter is usually required to be just compact enough to fit in the palm of our hands or our pockets. However, as earlier stated, to hack into any wireless network with the use of Kali Linux, the wireless card is required to support both packet injection and monitoring mode. Yet another more convenient aspect of the USB wireless adapter is that it is highly recommended that they do support plug and play, while also ensuring to have dual-band capabilities.
This generally means that the wireless connection will be able to connect to other devices either with the use of 2.4GHz band or the 5GHz band. Nonetheless, approximately every USB adapter implements the use of wireless-n or the 802.11n standard. This is the most standard version that employs the use of multiple antennas to facilitate faster data rates, which serves into the test. Hence the need of first ensuring that wireless adapter can support this function. The injection test can generally be stated for use in determining whether the wireless card can successfully determine and inject the ping response times to the Access Points (Reshadi, 2020). The iwconfig helps us in gathering enough information about the wireless interface, wlan0, usually created for the wireless adapter.
Now, typing the command lsusb -vv will provide much more detailed information regarding the wireless card. During the wireless hacking activity, Isusb plays a very important role as a utility commonly used in displaying USB buses information of all the USB buses which are in the system and their interconnected devices.
References
Reshadi, M., Rad, F., & Khademzadeh, A. (2020). A Flow Control and Scheduling Mechanism to Improve Network Performance in Wireless NoC. IET Communications.
Cholvi, V., Garncarek, P., Jurdzinski, T., & Kowalski, D. R. (2019). Packet-oblivious stable routing in multi-hop wireless networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.12379.