WiFi Hotspot

Summary

Easy WiFi traffic capture with wireshark running on Wifi hotspot from an ordinary WiFi interface of a notebook.

Requirements

• Operating system: Ubuntu 16.04 bionic amd64 with LXDE desktop environment
• Further required: network-manager and wireshark

Description

Step 1

Open the context menu of the network-manager and choose 'Create New Wi-Fi Network...'

Step 2

Enter a name for your WiFi network and select for now Wi-Fi security: None

• Connection: New
• Network name: <Yournetworkname>
• Wi-Fi security: None

Confirm with Create.

Step 3

After creation go for the context menu and choose 'Edit Connections ...', select your recently created Wi-Fi connection and 'Edit'. Then choose at the 'Mode:' option 'Hotspot' and press 'Save'. If you do not save in between there is no option 'WPA & WPA2 Personal' shown in the WiFi-Security submenu.

Step 4

Again choose 'Edit Connections ...' and select your recently created Wi-Fi connection and 'Edit'. Now you can select 'WPA & WPA2 Personal'shown in the WiFi-Security submenu and enter a password and press 'Save' again.

You can also manipulate the connection configuration by CLI

    sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/<Yournetworkname>

and restart the network-manager

    sudo service network-manager restart

Step 5

Check your WiFi interface with

    iwconfig

Connect the device you are examining to the new Hotspot and capture the traffic with wireshark on this WiFi interface.

Used Hardware

Notebook with WiFi interface

References

• https://www.wireshark.org/
• https://ubuntu.com/core/docs/networkmanager/configure-wifi-connections (command line)
• http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2016/04/create-wifi-hotspot-ubuntu-16-04-android-supported/ (for gnome desktop environment)