WiFi Analyzer

SniperGuy

I've got a Netbook and an iPhone. My coworker here in the IT department tells me there's an application he can get for his Droid that allows him to connect to a wireless network and then locate physically where other people are that are connected to that network. He said he can even hold it up and the camera will highlight where people are, like Google Goggles I guess?

So, is there anything for a netbook or an iPhone that is similar to this? Being able to track down individual users on the wifi to where they actually are would be awesomely useful.

Grimm

Sorry i have no idea if the iphone has what your looking for. Might i ask what the droid program is called though?

SniperGuy

Unfortunately he ran off before telling me the name, but when I get it i'll post it. I discovered MoocherHunter: http://securitystartshere.org/page-training-oswa-assistant-download.htm which looks similar to what I want, so I'll try that out. It's computer only.

Grimm

Thanks. I have a droid and that program sounds really useful. I hope MoocherHunter works out for you.

Captain Vash

I don't see how directional location is possible, call me stupid, but doesn't it take 3 radio towers to triangulate? I count 2.

mspencer

Speaking as a ham radio operator (which means I've passed tests showing I understand RF pretty well, but that' doesn't necessarily make me an expert) what he's describing is almost certainly impossible without gathering and comparing multiple observations.

Hams have a kind of "radio sport" called fox hunting, which involves using portable radio equipment and map reading / direction finding skills to locate hidden transmitters. Read about that and what's required to make it happen, and that will equip you with more than enough information to confront your friend and tell him how full of shit he is.

Specifically, if he's not relying on any intelligence gathered from the access point's signals, this is pure radio direction finding and the above equipment required for foxhunting would be required. If he IS reading the access point signal as well as the target device signal, then one of two situations applies. Either the access point is automatically adjusting output power depending on the receive signal strength of the device it's communicating with, or it's not.

If it isn't doing that then the access point isn't giving him any information about how well or how poorly it's receiving the target device's signal, except in the corner case where the connection with the target device's signal is so poor that you can try to infer strength from observing jamming signals and retransmissions due to a higher bit error rate.

If it is doing that then you can listen to the access point's transmissions to the target device and compare the received RF power compared to the access point's transmissions to you. If they are stronger then you know the target device must require more RF power to communicate with than your device does. If weaker then the opposite is true.

Once you know that, to do anything useful with it you would need to know the access point's relative position from you, not just its distance. That requires radio direction finding, so if you could do that you could just ignore the access point and locate the target device directly.

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Don't let your friend bullshit you with some screen that shows GPS satellites and claim it's showing wifi clients. You can plot GPS satellites on a screen like with Google Sky Map because GPS satellites occupy known frequency ranges and travel on known trajectories. If you know roughly where you are (via approximate location via cell tower) and you know the timing data received from a GPS satellite and what its frequency shift is, you can tell where it is in the sky because satellites are kinda predictable.

If he's showing you something that depicts the positions of unknown things numbered 1 through 32, he's probably showing you GPS satellite fixes. Challenge him to show something numbered 33 or higher, or change the display to MAC addresses or something similar.

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Also note that MoocherHunter requires a directional antenna, which your iPhone doesn't have -- and which is also a nearly essential ingredient in foxhunting if you read about it.

embrik

mspencer wrote: »

Also note that MoocherHunter requires a directional antenna, which your iPhone doesn't have -- and which is also a nearly essential ingredient in foxhunting if you read about it.

And neither does the Droid.

Also from the software description -
"In residential and commercial multi-tenant building field trials held in Singapore in March 2008, MoocherHunter™ allowed a single trained operator to geo-locate a wireless moocher with a geographical positional accuracy of as little as 2 meters within an average of 30 minutes."

mspencer is right on. An average of 30 minutes with a directional antenna means there's no way a cellphone with WiFi is going to do it in seconds with an omnidirectional antenna.

If I read your OP correctly, this coworker described the app to you, but didn't show you...

This is probably like the computer systems in movies and TV shows - looks super-fancy and powerful, but nothing like it exists in reality.