As with most chapters in this book, it was difficult to decide which applications to include in this chapter and which to leave out. The tools chosen to appear in this chapter in greater detail were chosen based on the popularity, usefulness, and availability of the software. Two of the tools that did not quite make the cut for this edition of the book, but which are worth a mention, are presented in this section.
Airopeek is a commercial packet sniffer and network traffic analyzer produced by Wildpackets, Inc. that is specifically designed for monitoring wireless networks. It works on Windows and supports most commonly available wireless cards. It has become the industry standard for capturing and aiding analysis of wireless networks. Airopeek does provide some automated analysis of network traffic, but like Wireshark, it requires a thorough understanding of the protocols involved to realize its full potential. It was left out here because it no longer offers a free trial demo available for download, and most of its features are now available in Wireshark for free. One thing that Airopeek has that Wireshark does not is Windows support. If you want similar functionality to Wireshark with a well-supported Microsoft Windows interface, then Airopeek might be worth looking into.
KisMac is a passive wireless discovery tool for the Mac OS X platform. In spite of its name, it is not associated with the Kismet project; the name was meant to indicate that it is similar to Kismet in that it is passive. The feature set for KisMac is impressive, including such options as SSID de-cloaking, GPS support with mapping, WEP cracking, de-authentication attacks, and more. Even more impressive is the support for wireless cards on the OS X platform. The KisMac development team has gone so far as to reverse engineer the Apple drivers to add rfmon support to the built-in Apple Airport and Airport Extreme cards. KisMac was not discussed in greater detail in this chapter because it works only on a limited number of platforms—as a result, it has a limited user base. If you are looking for full-featured wireless discovery and attack tools for a Mac OS X platform, KisMac might be worth trying.
—Michael Lynn