Wireless Network Security Using Raspberry Pi

This educational project uses a second generation Raspberry Pi that runs multiple Open Source software packages, to perform network penetration testing and to analyze the results. Implementing this project provides undergraduate students with practical hands-on experience and explains advanced concepts in computer hardware, operating systems, and network security. This project is fairly affordable, highly portable, easily deployable, alarmingly impactful, and highly rewarding. It also demonstrates the need for secure wireless networks against various attacks such as Man-in-the-Middle (MitM). This paper illustrates step-by-step instructions to assemble and integrate the project’s hardware parts, to download and configure software packages, and to perform customized network operations such as packet sniffing and filtering. Kali Linux for Raspberry Pi is the chosen operating system due to its extensive and powerful collection of White Hat hacking tools such as Wireshark (Network Protocol Analyzer), Nmap (Network Mapper), and SSLstrip (Secure Sockets Layer strip). Additional wireless network auditing tools are used from the robust FruityWifi package. Wireshark filters, captures, and analyzes network packets, such as hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) requests. SSLstrip strips the secure connection and convert HTTPS to hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), gaining access to sensitive information such as login credentials. This simple to implement yet powerful project, demonstrates the ease of hiding and discreetly deploying a Raspberry Pi on a vulnerable wireless network to sniff network packets that is considered protected behind firewalls, while maintaining a safe distance and anonymity from the target.