There was some interest from people on how to visualise wifi nodes.
this is the second step that shows how to parse and simply visualise in
processing data harvested using kismet.
is a small processing sketch to demonstrate a way of doing so., just unzip it into your sketch folder there is a lot of room for improvement but that gives an idea of the process, as a ground base if you use kismet xml generated data. the result is very basic looking but good enough to
have an idea of what’s what :
Bit of a technical note to show a step by step of what i did to get kismet to work on linux with a gps device (a garmin venture hc gps) and output the data harvest as an xml file.
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I – Installing kismet
1 – getting kismet.
$sudo apt-get install kismet
2 – configure kismet.
For me kismet.conf was in :
/etc/kismet/kismet.conf
This file can be installed in different places depending on your distro. I run Ubuntu gutsy. If you’re unsure to where it might be do:
$sudo updatedb
$locate kismet.conf
open the configuration file as super user :
$sudo gedit /etc/kismet/kismet.conf
you should see something like that :
what i changed was :
source=ipw2200,eth1,kismet
suiduser=[myUser]
This was on a Thinkpad T43 with this network card:
Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection (rev 05)
if you’re unsure about what card you have, you can list the pci devices with :
$lspci
3 – run kismet:
in a terminal start kismet as super user:
$sudo kismet
The only issue i’ve found was that the network doesn’t restart automatically as the card doesn’t like when exiting monitor mode mode. To get it back to work i just unselected the wireless card from the network manager and ticked it back again. Pressed apply. sorted. There must be a command line to do this tho.
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II – GPS configuration
1 – get a gps : ) im my case i got a garmin venture hc
2 – install gpsd
3 – start gpsd.
In my case it was connected onto usb port:
$sudo gpsd -p /dev/ttyUSB0
Make sure to start gpsd before kismet and it should be all good from there. Kismet will pick it up and start parsing the gps points along with the wireless activity in range.
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Invisible Journeys is my first try at data visualisation. I have seen a few wifi geographical mapping, but they looked a bit too technical to my taste. Here, i aimed at a semi abstract visualisation while keeping the ability to extract sense out of the graphics. Below is one of the visualisation showing 4 different journeys. Bigger to smaller rings : London / Vescemont / Belfort / Barcelona.
Each circular item represent the recording of wireless networks along one journey.
The time dimension starts reading from the right then goes clockwise along the main black thick line.
Each successful node recording influences the time line thickness and adds a “pin” onto it. Red pins represents non encrypted networks other networks are the smaller black ones.
Technically i have been using kismet for recording the wifi nodes. Unlike Netsumbler (windows only), kismet dumps a nicely formated xml file for each session. The only limitation i’ve found was that you can’t use it with a laptop that have pcmcia wifi card. Those cards can’t go into rfmon mode (to constantly scan the network).
Once the xml file was created, it was then easy to get all the data into processing using the xml native library.
Next step is to pair wifi recording with gps. The good new is that Kismet seems to be able to handle both at the time.
More images of the ongoing process can be found on my flickr set
more later.
