Monday, June 9, 2008

Getting aircrack to work on Dell Latitude D620 using Ubuntu

Update - I have gotten this working and am working on writing a basic intro to how I did it. Before I do that, however, I would like to basically try it from scratch again to make sure I can write a decent tutorial.

So, I am trying to get aircrack installed on Ubuntu. I have never been able to get a wireless card to capture in 'promiscuous ' mode, meaning (as I understand it) that it not only captures the packets to/from you, but also all the packets to/from everyone else that are in range of your card.

So, figured I would give it a shot. So far its a spotty road.
Started with this nice tutorial
http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=getting_started

Sadly, my card was not listed ;0 . Following the recommendation, I Google Linux, which brings me to this lovely article
http://intellinuxwireless.org/?
Note: The iwlwifi project provides a driver which utilizes the mac80211 subsystem for the Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN and Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection adapters.

So, I get busy trying to install the mac80211 stuff. I go through a lot of stuff, but the final result is not so good. One thing to note that is not on their page about install the subsystem, got off zolton's blog was this line
sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r` /lib/modules/`uname -r`/source

Otherwise your compilation fails b/c it cannot find anything in the /source folder.

So, I managed to make, and then make_install. Sadly, I got weird errors make modules module_install stage on the how to install mac80211 subsystem page

turns out that with ubuntu 8.04 there is a bug in the kernal, and its not exactly a breeze to get it working till that is fixed.

So, I twiddle my thumbs for a bit and head on over to the compat-wireless project. So far, its going well. I have DLed the tar, ungipped, and we are compiling ;)

Post updates if I get it working.

2 comments:

Hamilton said...

Not working yet ;)
As an update, it broke my Ubuntu wireless, and when I tried to uninstall it did not restore it automatically like it is supposed to do.

However, I am getting a new Hard Drive tomorrow, so it looks like I might start over from scratch.

Hamilton said...

Sigh.

Well I can get the card in moniter mode - which means I can see other peoples packets.

This means that given enough time, aircrack could crack a WEP key. Enough time could be a few days though, so the common answer is to inject packets into the network that cause the wireless access point to resend connection data - the critical data that you need in order to brute force the password.

Poop