AirSnort on Windows Information Page

This software is OLD

The original Windows capability was developed for Windows 2000. Getting the software to run on Windows at all is a miracle as few Windows drivers support monitor mode. The software is no longer maintained or supported. Besides, there are much better tools out there. You really should be trying something like aircrack-ng. If you really need Windows support, I suggest you look into the AirPcap family of devices, some of which allow packet transmission. You may be able to adapt aircrack-ng to run on top of them.

Help Forums

Sourceforge help forums

Updated - 02/20/04

Windows XP Setup: User Mike has developed a guide to getting Airsnort running on Windows XP

Cisco users: Specify DWL-650 as your card type and things should work.

Note: Windows users should always start captures in channel scan mode! After the capture has been started, you can change to single channel monitoring if you like. If you start your capture in single channel mode you are not likely to see any packets. I am trying to figuire this problem out.

With the help of a Windows user, I was able to learn that packets captured using DWL-650 cards are slightly different than those captured with Orinoco cards. There are now two options for Windows users in the driver type dropdown. Choose the one appropriate for your card. If airopeek works fine with your card but airsnort is not seeing anything, then try choosing a different card type. If you are still having problems, then supplying me a small capture file created with winmonitor or the "Log to file" option of airsnort will help me to track the problem down.

Configuration information: Pay Attention

It is beyond me why this is so difficult for some people If you are incapable of compiling your own windows executable, look in the bin subdirectory of the airsnort distribution and you will find one just sitting there waiting for you! If that is still not clear enough, try this: 
   1. download the airsnort tarball from sourceforge
   2. untar the tarball
   3. cd into airsnort-0.2.7c/bin
   4. dir  (lo and behold, airsnort.exe)

Background

Ever since Airsnort appeared there has been a steady stream of requests for a Windows version. I have been less interested in providing a Windows version of Airsnort, and more interested in develpoing a generic open source monitor mode capability for Windows. Once that was done I figured that porting Airsnort would not be much of a problem, and I would hope to see other tools like Kismet follow suit.

Unfortunately, I don't know the first thing about driver programming for windows. AiroPeek is one tool that I am familiar with that does monitor mode style wireless packet capture, so rather than learn to write Windows drivers and attempt to port some Linux code, I decided to reverse engineer AiroPeek. Fortunately for me, I was not asked to click through any heinous demands when I grabbed the AiroPeek demo, and I commenced to reverse engineering.

The solution makes use of peek.dll in order to grab monitor mode packets. You will need to download and install one of the airopeek demos to grab this file.

What you need

Known Issues

Contact Me

Email Snax with questions, comments, suggestions and patches.
Last Modified: 12/25/04

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