Wireless Network & Security: Analyzing WLAN Traffic with Sniffing Tools

This document explores the use of various network sniffing tools for analyzing WLAN traffic. It delves into the features, advantages, and disadvantages of Wireshark, Acrylic Wi-Fi, Kismet, and SolarWinds Wi-Fi Monitor. The document also includes a practical analysis of a home WLAN setup using Acrylic Wi-Fi Home, highlighting security considerations and the benefits of dual-band routers.

BN303
Wireless Network & Security

Contents
Task one......................................................................................................................................................2
Wireshark....................................................................................................................................................2
Features...................................................................................................................................................2
Difference from another tool..................................................................................................................2
Advantages and disadvantages...............................................................................................................2
Screenshot...............................................................................................................................................3
Acrylic Wi-Fi.................................................................................................................................................3
Features...................................................................................................................................................3
Difference from another tool..................................................................................................................4
Advantages and Disadvantages...............................................................................................................4
Screenshot...............................................................................................................................................4
Kismet..........................................................................................................................................................5
Features...................................................................................................................................................5
Differences from other tools...................................................................................................................5
Advantages and Disadvantages...............................................................................................................5
Screenshot...............................................................................................................................................5
Solar Wind Wi-Fi Monitor............................................................................................................................6
Features...................................................................................................................................................6
Differences from other tools...................................................................................................................6
Advantages and disadvantages...............................................................................................................6
Screenshot...............................................................................................................................................7
Task Two......................................................................................................................................................8
Location...................................................................................................................................................8
Technical Information..............................................................................................................................8
Working Mechanism................................................................................................................................9
Observation.............................................................................................................................................9
Security of WLAN...................................................................................................................................10
Dual Bands and its advantages..............................................................................................................10
Security implications..............................................................................................................................10
References.................................................................................................................................................11

Task one
The transformation of network technologies has progressed in every direction. So the most problem
faced by any of the network infrastructures is in the wireless medium. Because the WLAN setup requires
very less effort and money as compared to the other medium. But the most important issues with this
medium is nature of it. Since the wireless communication is easily tracked by any attacker and cracker in
the near place of the WLAN network [1].
Most of the setup faces the dos attack in the form of the rough traffic. This will disrupt the normal
working of an organization. There are various tools available which provide this type of functionality
some of them are free and some of them require a paid license version. These tools are mostly utilized
by the network security engineer to analyze and troubleshoot the network so that they can find the
issue and fix it.
So the explanation of some of the sniffing tool technology is given below
- Wireshark
- Acrylic Wi-Fi
- Kismet
- Solar Wind Wi-Fi Monitor
Wireshark
Wireshark is one of the open source tools which is freely available on the internet and used by most of
the network administrator to monitor and troubleshoot the traffic. The tool is a network analyzer which
captures the network packet on any network medium. And tries to display the data as detailed as
possible. This tool is not very complex and has very simple interface to manage and operate [2].
Features
The main features of this tools are
- Open source and free license to use
- Support almost all the OS
- Live capture and offline analysis
- Deep inspection of the captured traffic
Difference from another tool
The tool is most widely used in the network industry and trusted by almost every network and system
engineer. Very helpful in troubleshooting the network of the company and analyzing the traffic.
Advantages and disadvantages
Advantages
- Free and open source software tool
- Support most of the network protocol and can be integrated into various solutions
- Support all type of the network medium
- Detailed network traffic packet analysis

Disadvantages
- No support is available
- Doesn’t have customized GUI support
Screenshot
The working snapshot of this tool is given below.
Figure 1: Wireshark analysis
Acrylic Wi-Fi
The Tool is the industrial solution which is used for the network analysis purposes. The tool comes with
the paid license. And it captures a lot of data from the available WLAN medium and displays various
types of data to analyze the network. It is specially designed to analyze the WLAN network. The
interface of the software is very intuitive and displays a lot of option to customize the results [3].
Features
The important features of this tool are as follows:
- Wi-Fi packet and traffic sniffing

- Support for integrated 802.11 standard traffic dissector
- Sniffing support for normal and monitor mode
- GUI Interface for enhanced integrated support for visualization of traffic and network
Difference from another tool
The main part of the software is that it provides a great visualization in its GUI interface which most of
the sniffing tools lack. The novice user can easily understand its interface and use it to detect the
wireless network at that scanning area.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages
- The main advantage is that the tool provides easy to use GUI interface
- Support to provide heat maps
- Detect hidden network and SSID in the area
- Sniffing traffic and analysis
Disadvantages
- Full features setup requires licensed version setup
Screenshot
The working screenshot of the tool is given below
Figure 2: Acrylic Wi-Fi analysis

Kismet
This software tool provides a wide range of functionality from WLAN sniffing to Network packet analysis.
It can also show the traffic from the hidden network or un-broadcasted SSID of the AP. So it can provide
the various facility to troubleshoot the network where network is not behaving properly as expected. It
is specially designed for the wireless network detector [4].
Features
Some of the main highlighted features of this tool are:
- 802.11 sniffing
- Standard PCAP logging which is compatible with various other tools
- Plug-in architecture to provide expansion of the core features
- Multiple source capture capability
- Export data of the live packet capture
Differences from other tools
The main difference in the tool is that it provides support for various Wi-Fi LAN standards which most of
the tools lack. The tools are freely available on the internet so which provide reachability to all the
network engineer who free solutions.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages
- The main advantage of this tool is free to use in any environment
- The source code is available on the official website
- Support for various OS
Disadvantages
- Not useful for use in the industrial setup
- Report generation is absent
Screenshot
The working snapshot of this tool is given below and it is not having GUI interface.

Figure 3: Kismet analysis
Solar Wind Wi-Fi Monitor
Solar Wind Network Performance Monitor solution which serves engineer to get the most detailed out
of the local area for local WLAN setup. Now the Wi-Fi Monitor displays a lot of information regarding the
network traffic and able to analyze the area to provide heat maps, network availability, sniffing
capability and etc. The tool is easy to use and anybody can use it [5].
Features
It provides the following features
- It can easily discovery and monitor wireless access points
- It can provide heat maps of the AP
- Manage and monitor Wi-Fi infrastructure
Differences from other tools
The main purpose of this tool is to provide the administrative monitoring of the Wi-Fi System installed in
the network infrastructure. It can provide multi-vendor support of various AP. It can provide advanced
troubleshooting and monitoring support which other most of the tools lack. It generates cross-stack
network data for correlation.
Advantages and disadvantages
- Advantage
o The main advantage of this tool is the easy to use interface
o 24x7 Support from the vendor
o Visualization of the captured data
- Disadvantages
o The main disadvantage is the license cost
o Requires advance tool to monitor the network

Screenshot
The basic working snapshot of the tool is given below which clearly display a rich visual interface for an
engineer.
Figure 4: Solar Wind Wi-Fi Monitor analysis

Task Two
This task requires the analysis of the actual WLAN setup in any desired location. Now in order to
perform this task, we need to select the appropriate tool to do this. Since there are various tools
available on the internet. We have chosen the acrylic Wi-Fi Home tool to analyze the network traffic
Tool: Acrylic Wi-Fi Home
Location
To perform this task we have chosen the home location. Because the WLAN AP is the common thing in
today’s world. And most of the time it has been seen that the home user doesn’t configure their AP
properly and left it vulnerable for a security attack. We have chosen two location
- Inside the home building
- Outside the home building
Technical Information
So the technical information we have gathered for the two location is totally different so the snapshot of
the two location is given below which has all the necessary information about the APs.
- Inside the home building
Figure 5: Acrylic Wi-Fi Home
- Outside the home building

Figure 6: Acrylic Wi-Fi Home analysis outside home
Working Mechanism
We need to simply open the tool from the start menu. After that, it will automatically start capture the
network traffic to get some information out of the traffic. And display it according to the type of single
strength and etc. The tool can be configured to advanced monitoring mode to view the hidden networks
also.
Observation
Now according to the captured information from the software tools. The network sniffing at two
different location shows totally different results. The inside home location shows less number of AP’s as
compared to the outside location where the number of AP’s are very large. So the main reason behind
this is the number of objects coming between the access point and the WLAN sniffing tool receiver.
Every object observes some of the radio waves emitted by the WLAN AP. That’s why we receive a large
amount of single outside the home as compared to inside home building location. Some of the technical
information we can get from analyzing the WLAN network is as follows.
- SSID
- MAC Address of the Router
- RSSI
- Channel on which it is operating
- Max Speed the router can attain.
- Vendor name
- Security protocol used by it
And so on and we can even deeply analyze the traffic once the packet capturing feature is available on
the router.

Security of WLAN
Most of the WLAN AP is configured with the default setting where they use the old WPA protected
mechanism and sometimes found out that the people put the AP open so that anyone can join the
network. So in order to secure the WLAN setup at any location, we need to follow the following steps
- Enabling AES encryption for the network connection.
- Using the WPA2 setup for security the network communication between the AP and the Client
machine.
- Using MAC filtering to restrict the number of user the AP can handle.
- Using strong key for the AP so that it is hard to guess.
- Physically hid the AP so that attacker can’t get access to the access point directly.
Dual Bands and its advantages
The dual-band AP are the most popular devices in the today’s world. The dual-band Wi-Fi router
supports both the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands. So they can take advantage of both the channel at once. So
any device which can support either of the channels can easily able to connect to the AP. So its
backward compatible also.
The Speed of the network is the most important part. And the router can support a large number of
users and high-speed connectivity if the user device supports 5GHz bandwidth.
Security implications
The main security implication of the WLAN AP.
- The user can connect to the rogue AP if the SSID broadcast is disabled
- Some devices don’t support the hidden WLAN network

References
[1] B. Mitchell, "Wireless Local Area Networking (WLAN) Explained", Lifewire, 2018. [Online]. Available:
https://www.lifewire.com/wlan-816565. [Accessed: 04- May- 2018].
[2] M. Rouse, "What is Wireshark?", WhatIs.com, 2018. [Online]. Available:
https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Wireshark. [Accessed: 04- May- 2018].
[3] E. Geier, "8 free Wi-Fi stumbling and surveying tools", Network World, 2018. [Online]. Available:
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2925081/wi-fi/8-free-wi-fi-stumbling-and-surveying-tools.html.
[Accessed: 04- May- 2018].
[4] Pawar, "Kismet", Slideshare.net, 2014. [Online]. Available:
https://www.slideshare.net/nileshpawar9655/kismet-39434780. [Accessed: 04- May- 2018].
[5] Z. Davis, "Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor", PCMag Business Software Index, 2017.
[Online]. Available: https://www.pcmag.com/business/directory/infrastructure-management/593-
solarwinds-network-performance-monitor. [Accessed: 04- May- 2018].