"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 real-world penetration testing!
Wireless penetration testing is a practical subject, and it is important to first set up 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 moving on in this book.
In this chapter, we will take a look at the following:
- Hardware and software requirements
- Installing Kali
- 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 are desirable. This is because we may be running a lot of memory-intensive software in our experiments.
- One wireless adapter (optional): Depending on the wireless card of your laptop, we may need a USB Wi-Fi card that can support packet injection and packet sniffing, which is supported by Kali. The best choice seems to be the Alfa AWUS036H card from Alfa Networks, as Kali supports this out-of-the-box. This is available on www.amazon.com for a retail price of £18 at the time of writing. An alternative option is the Edimax EW-7711UAN, which is smaller and, marginally, cheaper.
- One access point: Any access point that supports WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryption standards would fit the bill. I will be using a TP-LINK TL-WR841N Wireless router for the purpose of illustration in this book. You can purchase it from Amazon.com for a retail price of around £20 at the time of writing.
- An Internet connection: This will come in handy for performing research, downloading software, and for some of our experiments.