Want to take advantage of your neighbor's super fast Wi-Fi
connection? If they're smart, they probably have it password protected
(otherwise you wouldn't be reading this, would you?). But if you have an Android
phone, you can get back at them for always parking in your spot and slamming
the door when they get home at 2 a.m.—by stealing...er, borrowing, their
connection.
A group of researchers came up with a hack to get around
hardware limitations and add monitor mode to Android devices to allow them to
crack Wi-Fi passwords.
Monitor mode lets you see all the traffic going through a
network and how many devices are connected to it, but it can also be used for
more nefarious purposes. If you're patient enough, you can crack the WEP key on
a network by capturing data packets in monitor mode.
To add monitor mode to an Android device, the researchers
reverse engineered the Broadcom radio chip. They modified the firmware on the chipsets
in the Nexus One and Galaxy S II, which are the same ones used in the majority
of mobile devices. The code is posted on Google Code, but you'll need to know
which chipset you have and download the right one for your phone.
Once you've downloaded the code, it's as simple as
extracting the .zip file, then running the setup and configuration files.
They've included instructions for each chipset and a few different devices on
their blog, so head over there to find the specifics for yours.
After it's up and running, check out one of our tutorials to
learn how to use it to crack the key. So, next time your neighbor wants to
borrow your power drill, rest assured that you're "borrowing"
something much more valuable from them!
