1. Title of Presentation
"There is wardriving, and there is GWARDRIVING "
"Tips and tricks for extreme wardriving, lots of radios over extreme distances."
2. Presenter(s) Name
@D4rkm4tter (Mike Spicer)
@elkentaro (El Kentaro)
3. Abstract
With the world continuing to add wireless to everything, wardriving is an exciting way to see what’s in the air around you. No longer are we looking for free Internet but weird, strange and unexpected things that are connected when maybe they shouldn’t be.This talk will look at how 2 wardriving obsessed people tackle the challenges and build equipment and tune software to catch them all!
Whether you are just starting out or your capture goals are to conceal ultra portable devices or get full frame captures of everything this presentation will share with you the tools and strategies so you can become obsessed with wardriving and start capturing wireless today.
4. Bio
Mike Spicer (@d4rkm4tter) is a hacker who likes to meddle with hardware and software. He is the creator of the #WiFiCactus and has been seen presenting at a number of conferences around the world. He is a Kismet cultist and obsessed with wardriving.
El Kentaro is the guy who builds wifi gadgets for fun and has been involved with the hacker community for over two decades.Kentaro enjoys watching movies and taking long warwalks at night strolling through the dark corners of Tokyo.
Together they host The Wireless Shit Show on all things wireless wardriving.
5. Detailed Outline
Intro: (3 minutes)
Introduction and explanation of who we are and what we’ve done.
Wireless stuff that we’ve done.(7 minutes)
We briefly describe our past projects and ideas that have led us to where we are today.
Why Wardriving? That's soo script kiddie noobzzz. (8 mins)
The Resurgence: There has been a huge resurgence in war driving thanks to wireless being included into every thinkable device on the market. This portion of the presentation will describe the various types of devices and the interesting aspects of capturing them such as tracking Tesla’s by their BLE beacons or people still using unsecured hotspots in 2022.
The tools are better now, Kismet is a true swiss army knife when it comes to passive capturing wireless information.
The wireless cards are cheaper and diverse. We are no longer limited to capturing only 802.11 traffic.
We will also discuss how more and more people are joining the community thanks to the impact of Wigle.net and the RF Santuary’s World Wide WarDrive (WWWD). We are in the beacon hunters gold rush.
Wardriving is (can be) Easy: We will discuss how easy it is for anyone to start most likely with the hardware they already own. The audience should be able to start getting involved during our talk thanks to the simplicity of the Wigle.net app and Kismet. Also we will explain why setting up an account on Wigle.net will help and make the experience even more exciting.
We will briefly talk about other available tools and their advantages and disadvantages in this section such as Aircrack-ng suit, WiFilite, and Horst. We will explain how to get started with these tools for people who are running Kali or Pentoo Linux.
What to look for when purchasing an Android phone to get started on using the wigle.net app. (Android version, hardware)
Since one of the main goals of Wardriving is internet points thanks to Wigle.net we will also discuss methods of exporting the data from the tools described here and how to get it submitted to start competing.
When Wardriving Becomes an Obsession: (25 mins)
We will discuss the 2 cases of obsession that have overtaken us. The first obsession is hardware builds with lots of radios. D4rkm4tter is consumed with this obsession and it is seen in his projects like the WiFiKraken, Kraken-lite and WiFiCactus. The second case of obsession is building equipment to go long distances. El Kentaro is primarily consumed with this obsession. He focuses on making things ultralight and extremely power efficient. He also tweaks the software and storage to get every extra piece of performance out of the hardware.
The “lots of radios obsession” is the deep desire to capture all of the data in the air around you. Through previous experience we will describe how data can be lost when channel hopping and why it makes sense to use a setup with lots of radios like the WiFiCactus. This type of obsession creates a number of roadblocks that need to be solved for example, form factor to fit the design, throughput bottlenecks, excess heat generation, and dealing with the large amount of data captured. Through d4rkm4tter’s experience he will explain how he has overcome these issues and the compromises he had to make.
D4rkm4tter will discuss the design and build process for his latest project the Kraken-lite and the successes he’s had with it wardriving and using it as a fixed point monitoring device.
The “long distance obsession” is primarily caused by the fixation of covering large areas non-stop while relying on the uptime and reliability of the design to capture as many networks as possible. El Kentaro has built some of the most small and compact wardriving rigs which are built to not be a burden on his extremely long warwalks. This type of design requires going ultralight, has to have excellent power and storage management as well as being ergonomical.
How many radios of what type?
El Kentaro will discuss the build process for his latest projects the WiglePod and the Wigle Nalgene. He will explain the design tradeoffs and how he met the demanding set of requirements for these projects.
El Kentaro will discuss the successes and failures of his multiple ultralong distance warwalks.
El Kentaro will also briefly touch upon why he started to create his own backpacks to carry his rigs.
We will discuss the tools to go deeper into your new wardriving obsession. Like us, we will present the next steps to go farther whether it's with building out custom hardware and adding more radios or going deeper into the software and data to gain more understanding into what you’ve captured. We will discuss how we use custom scripts to automate tasks such as filtering and uploading. The tools we use are Bash scripts, Python, SQLite browser and Wireshark and we will discuss how we get the most out of these. D4rkm4tter’s tool Pcapinator which is used for performing analysis on large amounts of pcap files will be shown. The tool is open source and available on d4rkm4tter’s github.
Through our joint experience we will share our wardriving Pro Tips and lessons learned.
Hardware tips such as dealing with multiple interfaces and the challenges it presents. We will discuss why Linux kernels and drivers are important to making things work.
How to tune the software to avoid issues like the "write" problem and how to configure settings to capture effectively.
What to do when things go wrong. We’ve had hardware and power failures leaving corrupt Kismet DB’s, incomplete pcap files and broken operating systems. We will discuss recovery and restoration techniques.
The Wardriving Community ( 5 mins)
Lots of people have created awesome wardriving projects that can help give you more ideas to get started. Our community is full of very accepting and talented people who help inspire us and challenge us to continue to build better projects. We will review and share what are the latest things happening with the community and talk about how you can get involved.
A little history about our podcast "The Wireless ShitShow" and how it has kept El Kentaro and d4rkm4tter sane and connected to the community throughout the pandemic.
Questions (2 minutes)
6. Track Preference
One Track Mind 50. If selected for a 20 minute talk we would focus on the basic introduction and the reasons why one should go out and wardrive in this era and community aspects of wardriving.
If we don't get selected we will bring our own projector to present in the hallway.
7. Why is this a good fit for ShmooCon.
We build the custom rigs we use, the whole community belays each other through wigle.net and the community brings it with 810,332,617 wifi points logged over 20 years on wigle.net.
ShmooCon has the unique position where hackers who are also makers have presented in the past. We believe our talk will be interesting for anyone who wants to start wardriving or step up their game with building their first custom rig. The tips we plan to share will be useful for anyone who needs to do a long term wireless site assessment or surveillance beyond just hobbyist.
8. List of other conferences this submission has been submitted and/or presented
None.
9. First time presenter/Previous experience
We have not presented at ShmooCon before. Individually we have presented at Black Hat, DEF CON, CODE BLUE, BHACK,WOPR Summit, AVTokyo, Saintcon, DefCamp.
10. List of facilities requested
We would like to request a table and power to show our actual wardriving rigs.