[vox-tech] sniffing wireless packets / war driving

[Charles McLaughlin]

Ok... I know what your thinking.  No, I'm not trying to crack someone's
WLAN.  I just moved and am just curious if any WLANs are near by.  At my
old apartment complex, I was able to use my neighbor's DSL connection from
his wireless basestation.  He didn't even enable WEP, so I couldn't help
but use his signal -- my laptop automatically recieved an IP address from
his basestation!

Now... I've moved and am just curious what signals are out there.  I'm
using Kismet to sniff wireless packets.  I guess this is legal because I
haven't actually "circumvented" any encrypted packets. ;-)

Using Kismet,  I can see an infastructure type signal, which I assume is
a neighbor's WLAN basestation.  I've let Kismet run for two days
and have sniffed almost 80,000 packets, but none of them have been encrypted.
When I look at the WLAN using a Winbloze box, I'm asked for a WEP key.

My conclusion is that my neighbor's basestation is using WEP, but
s/he hasn't booted any wireless clients in the past two days.  Maybe that
is why none of the packets are encrypted?

Maybe I should mention that I don't know much about networking "theory" --
I'm more of a hands-on type of guy, so I hope this post makes sense.


Thanks for any insight,
Charles