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…).

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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.
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Dual 5GHz design

With 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks largely being considered legacy, wireless designs focusing only on 5GHz coverage are fast becoming the default. This is not really a new phenomenon, enterprise wireless design has been focused around 5GHz coverage for some years now, with secondary 2.4GHz coverage only for support of older devices. Today however, we see large venues and enterprises dropping support for 2.4GHz altogether. A number of manufacturers offer (and have for some time) the ability to configure an AP into dual-5GHz operation. Being able to change the (now unused) 2.4GHz radio into 5GHz mode provides additional 5GHz capacity without the need for additional APs. Today we examine some of the design options offered by dual-5GHz APs, along with some pros, cons, and caveats.

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