As people have a lot of imagination, these are some of the phrases you'll stumble upon any day now: Warwalking, Warwatching, WiLDing, Warbiking, Warhiking, Bluejacking and Bluestumbling.

Software

Although the software products I will mention weren't released in 2003, they were quite often updated during the past 12 months and received a fair amount of exposure in wireless security related discussions.


AirSnort is currently in version 0.2.3. Microsoft Windows users were pleasantly surprised when AirSnort developers announced in February that AirSnort alpha is working on the Windows platform. After some AiroPeek reverse engineering (this software does monitor mode style wireless packet capture, and as the AirSnort developer noted, it was easier to do some reverse engineering than learning to write Windows drivers), AirSnort can be run on Windows. Many Windows running wannabe wardrivers were happy with this news, but the developer noted: "I literally just got this running and I have not had a lot of time to debug anything". From the software's point of view, there were some new patches released - orinoco patch for orinoco-0.13d/0.13e drivers and dsniff patches to allow dsniffing in monitor mode.

Kismet, the popular 802.11 wireless network sniffer, received a lot of updates throughout the year. In February it was announced that kismet-devel is now supporting remote drone sniffers for distributed sniffing. The next couple of months brought us a Perl module that simplifies writing Kismet clients in Perl, Debian packages of the -devel tree, Gentoo ebuild scripts and possibility of doing OSX Viha capturing. At the end of July, version 3.0.0 stable was released, which was upgraded to 3.0.1 in a week, resulting with a lot of bugfixes. Besides the news I have noted, this new version offered integration with snort, new packet engine, a stateful packet inspector and a new alert system. Since then, the software is in constant development, so we will see what will Kismet developers bring us in the year 2004.