I'm investigating why in my Wireshark, I can't get any WLAN packets such as WPS, WPA and so on. Actually, any of the wlan filters, in order to filter by SSID or MAC, works. In Wireshark, in the WiFi interface, if I go to details, I see that the 802.11 WLAN option is disabled so there is no 802.11 WLAN traffic captures.
However, by investigating my PC drivers, apparently there is one driver that does it. This is the Intel (R) Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 which is the driver used in my WiFi interface.
I thought in the wireshark options, the 802.11 WLAN traffic should appear too, but it doesn't! I saw some people who also have the Driver Broadcom 802.11n Network Adapter but I'm not sure if I can install it because my PC may not have the Broadcom chip.
Is there anyone using Windows 10 that can get 802.11 packets? Thank you!
Yes, it's possible. Probably the easiest and cheapest way is to uninstall WinPcap and install Npcap. There are other ways too though, such as by purchasing an AirPcap adapter from Riverbed.
Refer to the Windows section of the Wireshark CaptureSetup/WLAN wiki page for more information.
Related
I am facing a weird problem...my PC has a RealTek PCIe GBE Family Controller Network card. I am trying to send data over UDP to my target embedded board using my own custom made GUI. Whenever wireshark is open in my PC, I can communicate successfully. However, if Wireshark is off, I cant communicate.
Also, on other PCs having a non-Realtek adaptor, I cant communicate with the target board even if Wireshark is open. Wireshark doesnt show any packets being sent by the GUI to the board. I have tried reinstalling both, Wireshark and Winpcap drivers but the issue still persists. I also have the latest drivers for my network card installed on my PC.
For sending data over UDP, the GUI is developed using MS Visual Studio 2008 using winsock library 2.0. I have used standard UDP protocol APIs for performing all the UDP operations.
Is the issue related to Wireshark or Network card or something else?
Please assist.
I am using native Wifi api on Windows to programmatically do a few tasks with WLANs. However, my problem is it exposes limited set of functions. I would like to access certain fields of a beacon frame that provides Access Point load, airtime and so on. Which are the tools that can be used to do this?
Thanks in advance!
I would take a look at winpcap. It is able to capture 802.11 frames. However, it is probable in windows that the chipset driver does not allow setting the WLAN to monitor mode. If this is the case then winpcap might not be able to get the necessary information about beacon frames.
There is also a commercial offering, airpcap, which seems to come bundled with drivers and hardware that allows to do full-scale wifi monitoring in windows.
There is one way to capture WiFi packets under Windows with Wireshark. You have to install Acrylic WiFi software
Acrylic WiFi is a WiFi sniffer for windows that installs an NDIS driver that captures wlan packets in monitor mode and also adds support to wireshark and Cain & Abel to capture WiFi packets.
Once Acrylic is installed you have to start Acrylic, wireshark or Cain as Administrator and select your NDIS WiFi interface.
In Windows Vista or later you can use Npcap that "support raw 802.11 traffic". Npcap is an update of WinPcap using NDIS 6 Light-Weight Filter (LWF).
https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/WLAN#Starting_from_Windows_Vista:_Npcap
I've been using winpcap to send raw packets over a wired connection for a while now. I'm building my own protocol (nothing special, just getting the hang of it) but now I want to extend it to wireless connections too. Does winpcap allow me to send raw packets over a wireless adapter?
I'm using VC++ on windows xp and windows 7. On my windows 7 machine it seems to work, but on my xp machine winpcap can't even open my adapter to send/receive packets. I tried to launch wireshark on my xp machine to see if the packets sent from my other machine arrived, but I wireshark couldn't open my wireless adapter either. Then rebooted into ubuntu and tried again. This time the wireshark did work, but the packets didn't show up.
Is there anything I should know about winpcap's limitations regarding wireless transmission? And if there are limitations is there an alternative that can let me send raw packets over wireless network on windows?
If "raw" means "raw 802.11 packets", then libpcap might allow it, but WinPcap, not so much. See my answer to another question. If you can put the adapter into monitor mode on Linux, *BSD, or OS X, you might be able to send raw 802.11 packets. On Windows, however, not only is putting it into monitor mode going to take a significant amount of work (probably including new kernel-mode code!), once you've put it into monitor mode, it might be impossible to send any packets.
If "raw" just means "raw IP packets", then raw IP sockets should work as well - or not well - as on Ethernet.
Windows 7 has a (neat?) new feature called a 'virtual wireless adapter'. Read about it here:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090516/windows-7-native-virtual-wifi-technology-microsoft-research/
I have an application that directly controls the windows wifi interface card using the Native Wifi API ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms706556%28VS.85%29.aspx ). Please take as a given for this question that I need to directly control the wifi adapter using this documented api and can't just leave it up to OS and user.
The Windows 7 virtual adapter is supposed to be included with any approved Windows 7 wifi drivers. The drivers that out there now seem to be pretty buggy, and I've found that unless I manually disable the virtual wifi adapter the real adapter will not reliably connect to a wireless access point when commanded by the WLAN api.
My main question is 'How to I detect the presence of a windows virtual wifi adapter?'
Note that the documentation for WlanEnumInterfaces says:
This virtual device normally shows up
in the “Network Connections Folder” as
‘Wireless Network Connection 2’ with a
Device Name of ‘Microsoft Virtual WiFi
Miniport adapter’ if the computer has
a single wireless network adapter.
This virtual device is used
exclusively for performing software
access point (SoftAP) connections and
is not present in the list returned by
the WlanEnumInterfaces function
.
I suspect there is shell api that might provide the enumeration that the control panel uses to display the virtual adapter.
For extra credit, how can I disable this adapter programatically?
Thanks in advance.
To detect the Windows 7 virtual adapter with the WLAN api you need to use the version defined by wlanapi.h in Windows SDK version 6.1.
You can enable or disable network adapters by using WMI or the INetConnection COM interface defined in netcon.h .
In the control panel > Network and Internet there's an option that says: "add a wireless device". I used that to detect the microsoft virtual wifi miniport adapter, cause after I installed Windows 7 it didn't appear in the network adapters but it was there and enabled, but not started.
To disable it from a command prompt run as administrator you could try:
netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=disallow
(or disallowed, I haven't tried). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd815243%28VS.85%29.aspx
From time to time, I need to dump USB traffic under Windows, mostly to support hardware under Linux, so my primary goal is to produce dump files for protocol analysis.
For USB traffic, it seems that SniffUsb is the clear winner... It works under Windows XP (but not later) and has a much nicer GUI than earlier versions. It produces huge dump files, but everything is there.
However, my device is in fact a USB serial device, so I turned to Portmon which can sniff serial port traffic without the USB overhead.
After five years waiting, now it's possible to sniff usb packets on windows
See http://desowin.org/usbpcap/tour.html for a quick tour. It works pretty well
Since people don't seem to realize it, Wireshark does monitor USB traffic and has a parser for it; but the catch is it only works under Linux. Wireshark on Windows will not do this.
It may be possible to plug the USB device you want to monitor, along with a Linux machine (with Wireshark running) and your Windows machine and just use the USB device under Windows.
Problem with the above? I don't know how the Linux machine or the Windows machine will detect each other.
Busdog, an open source project hosted on github, has worked well for me. It has a driver it installs to allow it to monitor USB communications. The config window allows you to reinstall or remove the device at any time.
You can select the USB device you want from an enumerated list. A nice feature is to have it automatically trace a new device that is plugged in:
Data communications to and from an SWR analyzer I was reverse engineering were captured flawlessly:
USBSnoop works too - and is free.
Or, you could buy a USB to Ethernet converter and use whatever network sniffer you prefer to see the data.
Personally, I'd use QEMU or KVM and instrument their USB passthrough code, and then use libusb to prototype the replacement driver in user space (this latter bit I've done before; writing USB device drivers in Python is fun!).
Microsoft Message Analyzer was able to capture USB traffic, with Device and Log File parser from MS: link
Update: as mentioned by #facetus, MS Message Analyzer has been retired on November 25 2019.