So my question is, Is it possible to set up some kind of software that listens and logs mobile devices and or laptops that comes in range of a WIFI network ?
What i essentially want the program to do is to save when the mac address came in range with the router and when it went out of range again
for instance being able to see when an employee arrives and than again leaves work. They however do not have access to the WIFI and the router is mac filtered but as far as i understand, almost every devices does communicate with the network from time to time.
Thanks in advance to anyone that would be able to assist.
I am still pretty new to the programming world and any assistance on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
6 Responses
I don't think that a soft alone can do this. You'll likely need a device equipped with a wireless adapter that support monitor mode. Then you'll need to a build a soft that use your wireless adapter to sniff wifi frames and grab especially the wifi 4-way handshake that happen when a device try to connect to the network though the wifi.
Personally I think it's better to do it on higher layer (you don't need to use a wifi adapter). For example, if you are using dynamic IP on your network you can monitor DHCP packets since the first think that a device will do upon joining a network is to request an IP to your DHCP server. You can use this mechanism to catch the device MAC and IP.
yes you can actually do that with a linux based router
you see if you were to check the logs of an ordinary router, it won't catch the mac address unless the device tries to communicate with the router
but with a linux based router you can listen to any MAC adress emitting any packet, not necessarily a device trying to "communicate" with the router
I'd suggest a router from ubiquiti running openWRT
if you really want this for to check when employees arrive and leave
there's much better ways to do that
as this way can be a little complicated for the non-experienced
you'd need a script that would take the mac address of the log file of the router, save them in a database and match each MAC address to it's owner
and don't forget that the script will have to save the dates too
I don't think you'd have time to manually check the log file of the router
Check out my piece on wireless probe frames. You can detect people via their devices.
This is perfect! Thank you! I will need to do a bit more preparation to this but this will work 100%
Glad we could help!
Thank you guys so much for the quick and informative responses.
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