Tip
"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my axe."
Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President
Behind every successful execution is hours or days of preparation, and Wireless Penetration testing is no exception. In this chapter, we will create a wireless lab that we will use for our experiments in this book. Consider this lab as your preparation arena before you dive into the real-world penetration testing!
Wireless Penetration testing is a practical subject and it is important to first setup a lab where we can try out all the different experiments in this book in a safe and controlled environment. It is important that you set up this lab first before proceeding ahead in this book.
In this chapter, we shall look at the following:
- Hardware and software requirements
- BackTrack 5 installation
- Setting up an access point and configuring it
- Installing the wireless card
- Testing connectivity between the laptop and the access point
So let the games begin!
We will need the following hardware to set up the wireless lab:
- Two laptops with internal Wi-Fi cards: We will use one of the laptops as the victim in our lab and the other as the penetration tester's laptop. Though almost any laptop would fit this profile, laptops with at least 3 GB RAM is desirable. This is because we may be running a lot of memory-intensive software in our experiments.
- One Alfa wireless adapter: We need a USB Wi-Fi card that can support packet injection and packet sniffing, and that is supported by Backtrack. The best choice seems to be the Alfa AWUS036H card from Alfa Networks as BackTrack supports this out-of-the-box. This is available on Amazon.com for a retail price of $34 at the time of writing.
- One access point: Any access point which supports WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryption standards would fit the bill. I will be using a D-LINK DIR-615 Wireless N Router for the purpose of illustration in this entire book. You can purchase it from Amazon.com where it is retailing at around $35 at the time of writing.
- An Internet connection: This will come in handy to perform research, download software, and for some of our experiments.