Brief introduction of software involved

Generally, there are three pieces of software involved in this project, namely Backtrack, Kali Linux and Kismet.

1.Backtrack

Backtrack is a professional set of security Linux distribution based on Linux which is widely used in the fields of digital forensics and penetration testing use, short for BT. It is released by Offensive Security Ltd. Now, Backtrack has been replaced by Kali Linux and will be no longer maintained.

Backtrack is not used only for WarDriving, but also provides users with over 200 security-related tools. In addition, support for Live CD and Live USB is a bright spot.

The newest version of Backtrack is BT5R3, and we used this to decrypt wireless network with WEP and WPA encryption modes.

There are 12 categories of tools in BT5:

◆Information Gathering

◆Vulnerability Assessment

◆Exploitation Tools

◆Privilege Escalation

◆Maintaining Access

◆Reverse Engineering

◆RFID Tools

◆Stress Testing

◆Forensics

◆Reporting Tools

◆Services

◆Miscellaneous

◆Mislamjan

Useful links：
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackTrack
http://www.backtrack-linux.org/

2.Kali Linux

Kali Linux is a newly developed Linux distribution maintained and funded by Offensive Security Ltd, which can be regarded as the advanced version of Backtrack. Contents and functions are quite similar to Backtrack, so we skip the detailed description here.

Useful links：
http://www.kali.org/
http://docs.kali.org/introduction/what-is-kali-linux

3.Kismet

Kismet is free software aiming to detect networks, sniff packets which can be built into an intrusion detection system for 802.11 WLANs. All 802.11 traffic (a/b/g/n) can be sniffed by a wireless card. This program which is written in C++ often runs under Linux, however, the client can also run on Microsoft Windows.

Kismet can detect and associate wireless APs (access points) and clients. Moreover, Kismet can detect wireless network attacks (mainly used in our project). To find networks as many as possible, Kismet continually change channels from one to another at random. Thus, Kismet is able to obtain more packets.

Useful links：
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kismet_(software)
http://www.kismetwireless.net/
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3595531

description of this project

Since the number of the wireless linked devices were increasing, the data security should be focused. As we detected the public Wi-Fi points, many Wi-Fi hotspots still use the WEP and WAP encrypt method, the data package transferring between the access point and the users could be easily hacked and attack. The simple illustration will show the data transfer and the possible hack point based on the 802.11 wireless technology. The different attack methods and the screenshot will upload in the next few weeks. 

In this project, the progress would be separated into two parts, the attack side and the detect side. The attack side is planed to  attack the AP or the device linked to the AP and block the access data (Denial of Service) even get the access key of the Access Point.
The detect side, we planned to use Kismet to monitor the frame and analyse the alarm files then get the alarm information. We would also monitor the retry rate which might get some indication of the attack.

short specification of this project

After we constitute the four-man group, we met our supervisor, Professor Marshall and received a brief introduction of our project.
Generally, our project is related to the wireless network. Before we attended the first meeting, we have done some preview about wireless network. For example, we searched some basic concepts such as AP (Access Point) and 802.11 (a wide-received wireless network principle) and we distinguished the difference between the WLAN and Wi-Fi. The supervisor used a PPT to show us the theory of wireless attack and defense, which rectify our misunderstanding that the wireless intrusion is not simply password cryptanalysis but various attack in different layer. He also showed us the popular software Backtrack (for attack) and Kismet (for detection).
With this simple acknowledgement of the project, we build an incomplete model of the intrusion detection constituting two PCs (one has installed backtrack and the other installed kismet), a user device (smartphone, iPad or PC) and an AP. We used to plan to use the attacking PC to disconnect the AP with user device and the attacker would pretend to be the AP and steal information from the user. Nevertheless, at the moment we could not make out the details of the process and the software being used only worked in the Linux circumstance which we know nearly nothing about it.
Therefore, we need do much work on the use of the Backtrack as well as Kismet and work hard to grasp the specific process of wireless intrusion detection.