How to make a BeagleBoard Wardriving Gadget

War driving is fun. It is the process of driving around the neighborhood in a car, FBI van, or bicycle, looking for unsecured wifi networks, and then checking out what might be on those networks. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to do this, for instance:

• Checking a company's various office locations to make sure that the wifi networks are secured
• Making sure that someone hasn't set up a rogue wifi router where don't expect one to be
• Demonstrating to friends and family why it is important to secure a wifi router with with passwords

But more often than not, there are slightly less legitimate reasons, including:

• Finding places to park where you can get free wifi to send emails or visit websites without being tracked
• Find wifi networks that are fun to hack around, and see what types of services are available
• Snoop traffic to watch people type in AOL instant messenger conversations to each other when they should definitely be working

Note: On the record, I have nneeeeeever done any of these things. Neeeeeeeever. Not me, nope. Nada.

So without further ado, here's how to make a BeagleBoard-Based Wardriving Gadget... the parts that I used for mine were:

• BeagleBoard
• BeagleTouch
• BeagleJuice plus standoffs
• BeagleJuice Power Splitter (handmade)
• Small 5V USB hub from the Beagle Accessory Pack
• Compatible Wifi Module
• 3 pieces of black electrical tape

Many of these parts are available in one kit. The BeagleJuice forked splitter basically just took the power cable from the USB hub, and spliced it nicely into the BeagleJuice power cable. This is what it looks like, compared to the basic BeagleJuice power cable:

Beautiful hand writing! Why thank you. No problem! My pleasure! It's way too late... I need sleep...


There really wasn't much to do, but in case it isn't obvious from the pictures, it was mostly just mechanical snap assembly:

1. I put the BeagleTouch onto the BeagleBoard
2. I mounted the BeagleJuice onto the back of the BeagleBoard
3. I wished I had done it in the opposite order, since the standoff screws would have been easier to mount if I had put them on the BeagleBoard-BeagleJuice first
4. I plugged the BeagleJuice Power Splitter into the BeagleBoard
5. I plugged the other end of the BeagleJuice Power Splitter into the USB hub
6. I plugged in the compatible wifi module into the end of the USB hub
7. Then I used electrical tape to connect everything together

When everything was mechanically connected, and assembled, the software was pretty straightforward... I used Kismet, which need a few extra packages to be installed, but these commands work start to finish:


$ wget http://www.kismetwireless.net/code/kismet-2010-07-R1.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf kismet-2010-07-R1.tar.gz
$ opkg install ncurses-dev libpcre-dev libpcap-dev libnl-dev
$ cd kismet-2010-07-R1
$ ./configure
$ make dep
$ make
$ make install


Then to get kismet up and running, I needed to first get wlan0, the wifi module operating and turned on, and then I just ran kismet:


$ ifup wlan0
$ kismet -c wlan0


The instructions are also on the Antipasto Wiki over here. Here's a video of me showing it off:





And here's a set of videos I took while walking around outside an abandoned office building very late at night (aka 2 hours ago)... you can see a bunch of wifi networks popped up:

I uploaded a few other pictures onto the Flickr page, and of course all the parts and source code is over at the Liquidware shop...