How to capture Wifi 802.11 traffic?

Question

I want to capture the wifi traffic from my wireless card, so what i have to do and are there tools for that? I know that there is aircrack-ng and airodump, but these tools need a extra wireless adapter and is their a possibility to capture wifi traffic without buying a extra wifi adapter?

this is a software recommendation and is not valid here, so this needs to closed. Have a look at wire-shark and ettercap. airodump is for when you are not connected to a wifi... the other tools are once you are connected — TheHidden, Mar 19 '16 at 15:54

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 19 '16 at 16:22

Aircrack-ng, Fern, and other sectools for wifi pen testing are a capture and correlate type application. If you do not need automated correlation and are simply interested in traffic capture out your own Ethernet interface you can capture with wireshark, tcpdump, netcat, ettercap, net hogs, scapy, cloudshark, packetyzer and many many more. They all have the ability to capture wifi traffic on the local interface: see this wiki for tuts on how to capture using shark for Windows:

https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/Loopback

This has details of how to setup capture for LAN out of local device interface and for capture self generated (local host) non Ethernet traffic from local host. (Use this to test if you are capturing). Hope this helps.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 21 '16 at 22:28

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if you have an Android you can root it and use intercept-ng or Shark for root. and then read the capture files on your computer as well, one of my favorite packet analyzers is Network Miner

answered Mar 21 '16 at 22:28

Spencer H

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 21 '16 at 04:57

arjun@arjun-Precision-T1600:~$ iw phy | grep -A 8 "Supported interface modes


    Supported interface modes
         * IBSS
         * managed
         * AP
         * AP/VLAN
         * monitor
         * mesh point
         * P2P-client
         * P2P-GO

If you get monitor mode in the list, you don't need to buy extra hardware.

Just put your card in monitor mode:

$ iwconfig <wireless_card> mode monitor

Wireshark to the interface:

$ wireshark -i <wireless_card>

How to capture Wifi 802.11 traffic?

3 Answers3