Discover mobile devices using Wi-Fi

Question

I am working on my abstract on the web and stumbled upon a small problem. One of the first steps in my work should be to have a computer running as an AP (I use hostapd for this), and with it to detect all the devices in the room in which Wi-Fi is currently turned on (no need to be connected with any AP).

I found a stream that pretty much asks the same thing ( detect mobile devices using Wi-Fi ), and I understand the answers that were given, but they don’t give any hint of how this can be done. The message ends by saying that the person was able to do this with Kismet, however I can only use Kismet to discover clients already associated with the AP.

Can someone point me in the right direction here please? If you are not using Kismet, then perhaps suggest another tool that works with Ubuntu.

Ps. I will need to run a continuous “room” check to find new devices, and then send this information to the event manager, written in Java.

Answer 1

I think you may have a WiFi card in monitor mode, scanning each channel for beacons. On Linux, aircrack-ng is the toolbox you are looking for. airodump-ng is a tool that shows you a list of devices located around your location. It is designed to display the first hot spots with potential customers, but also shows all devices that are connected to an access point or trying to determine an access point.

However, you cannot scan devices with a disconnected WiFi connection. I'm not sure about non-AP devices, I guess you can detect them if they send beacons anyway (for example, to detect Wi-Fi hotspots).

If you need it in Java, you can write a shell in airodump-ng or run airodump-ng as a service that outputs a file and read the file from a Java application.

There is no specific answer. I'm afraid, but I hope this helps you find a way to solve your problem.