This week I worked on trying to implement the “Polite WiFi” attack where we are able to ping devices with 802.11 null packets and get an acknowledgement packet in response (from which we can measure time-of-flight and signal strength). I’m still having some trouble with this; it seems that the library I’m using to send packets (Scapy) is not playing well with my wifi card, and I was constantly getting mangled MAC addresses when sending a null packet between devices. I am continuing to work to debug this. I also set up a hardware test platform with multiple antennas connected to an AX200 wifi card, and tested that I could successfully take measurements across the antennas with Wireshark.
As of now we are on-schedule and making solid progress, and I don’t feel that we need to make any corrections to the project schedule.
In the next week, I hope to figure out the issue with the wifi pinging and be able to measure ToF to different devices; and then start collecting real data using our antenna setup which we can start analyzing with the filtering algorithms.
The engineering principles I’ve been using heavily up til now includes electromagnetism/antennas (which I learned in Physics 2 and 18-220) as well as networks and wireless protocols (which I learned about in 18-213, 18-349, and 18-649).
Images attached of setting up the AX200 card with external antenna connectors, as well as a multi-antenna setup that I’ve been experimenting with using for measurements.
