Tools for detecting, monitoring and penetrating WiFi networks

• Kismet “is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic.” It will work on most Linux/Unix platforms, and has limited support for Mac OS X.
• Net Stumbler is the original wireless LAN scanning utility for Windows. Ministumbler will work with HPC2000, PocketPC 3.0, PocketPC 2002 and Windows Mobile 2003.
• Wireshark (formerly Etherial) is a network protocol analyzer for wired and wireless networks that supports a very large number of protocols. The software can be used for realtime or offline analysis. It’s free, open source, and is available for most platforms including most modern Unix/Linux platforms, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
• WiFiFoFum is a wifi scanner designed for PDAs running PocketPC 2003 and Windows Mobile 2005.
• Aircrack “is a set of tools for auditing wireless networks. It consists of: airodump (an 802.11 packet capture program), aireplay (an 802.11 packet injection program), aircrack (static WEP and WPA-PSK cracking), and airdecap (decrypts WEP/WPA capture files).” It runs under Linux, Windows, and Zaurus as well as Mac OS X under MacPorts.
• Hotspotter passively monitors the network for probe request frames to identify the preferred networks of Windows XP clients, and will compare it to a supplied list of common hotspot network names. If the probed network name matches a common hotspot name, Hotspotter will act as an access point to allow the client to authenticate and associate.
• WepLab “is a tool designed to teach how WEP works, what different vulnerabilities has, and how they can be used in practice to break a WEP protected wireless network. So far, WepLab more than a WEP Key Cracker, is a WEP Security Analyzer designed from an educational point of view.” “Weplab works under any flavor of Linux for i386 and PPC, Mac OS X and Windows NT/2000/XP.”
• bsd-airtools is a package that provides a complete toolset for wireless 802.11b auditing. It contains a WEP cracking application, a netstumbler clone and a few tools for Prism2 debug modes. Most of the utilities only fully work with a Prism2 chipset based card. The project is not being actively developed.
• WEPCrack is a tool for breaking 802.11 WEP keys. WEPCrack is written in Perl. The project is not being actively developed.
• Fake AP creates thousands of fake access points and beacon frames. It can be used to hide from detection or create honeypots.
• KWiFiManager can configure and monitor wireless LAN cards under Linux and KDE.
• Wavemon is a ncurses-based monitoring application for wireless network devices. It currently works under Linux with devices that are supported by the wireless extensions by Jean Tourrilhes (included in Kernel 2.4 and higher).
• GNOME Wireless Applet is a wireless link quality monitor panel applet for GNOME. It reads the link quality out of /proc/net/wireless and reports quality by altering color.
• NoCatAuth and NoCatSplash are captive portal packages offering centralized authentication code for sharing internet services.
• Radio Mobile for windows is a free tool to predict the performance of a radio system.
• KarlNet‘s KarlBridge software is used by both AirPort and Orinoco access points. They also provide a configuration tool which will work on a number of access points based on their software.