This week, I worked on getting the Polite Wifi mechanism to work. I got the usb dongle and started working with it, but it was harder than I thought to get it to work, most likely due to driver issues. The dongle had official driver support for windows and mac, but not linux, and there were many different open-source drivers that claimed to work but apparently did not. While trying to make the packet injection work and messing with the driver and network interface settings, the Ubuntu setup I had broke and was not able to boot up, which forced me to reinstall everything I had set up. I also don’t have much experience with wifi in particular, so it took a lot of trial and error to learn how Scapy works, or how to work with the network manager and the network interface in ubuntu (the OS we’re using because PicoScenes only works in a specific ubuntu version with a specific kernel). Eventually with the right drivers and right setup for the network interfaces, I was able to confirm that the polite wifi mechanism did indeed work (shown in the screenshot attached).
Next week, I will work on scripting MAC address sniffing and time measurement with the polite wifi mechanism. I did get some of the orderings mixed up in terms of what I should do according to the schedule, but looking at the number of days I’m not falling behind.
Polite wifi in action:
The packet that was sent via Scapy:
