Month: August 2020

Posted on

Finding hidden SSIDs

The topic today is hidden SSIDs and some misconceptions about the benefits.

Hiding of the SSID is a common feature available in most wireless systems. The basic idea is that if the SSID name is not advertised, no one will know about the wireless network, but this is not entirely true. Hiding the SSID is useful only as a mechanism for protecting against casual onlookers. It holds no significant value as a security mechanism, nor should it be considered a security mechanism, and actually has a couple of disadvantages which can outweigh the benefit of using it.

Continue reading “Finding hidden SSIDs”
Posted on

Building a Wi-Fi scanner with Scapy

The idea for this post came about from just wanting to play around with Scapy. Not having spent any time on it before, it was high time to see what this excellent packet crafting tool was all about. There was no well-defined end goal here, only a desire to dissect some packets. In the end (about 20 hours later), what came out of it is essentially a Wi-Fi network reconnaissance tool. As such, it almost feels obligatory to have a disclaimer stating that the content provided here is for educational purposes only, if it wasn’t for the fact that the tool is harmless (besides exposing networks with weak security that is…).

Continue reading “Building a Wi-Fi scanner with Scapy”
Posted on

Scripting SSH to network devices

This blog entry is a follow up to a previous post called Scripting the WLC.

As a summary, the original post addressed programmatic access to a Cisco AireOS WLC, using Python to log in to the WLC and collect the output of a given command.

A few things have changed since then, which is the reason for this update, specifically:

  • Older AireOS versions had an issue (CSCve45024) affecting the login process which is resolved in newer AireOS versions.
  • Current generation Cisco WLCs run IOS-XE which does not have any login issues, meaning no creative workarounds are required.
  • As it turns out, there are better ways to do certain things, so some limitations of the original script no longer apply.
Continue reading “Scripting SSH to network devices”