WarBox: Portable wardriving over Raspberry PI

Wireless access points are everywhere, at home, offices and public places like shopping malls, on the road and open spaces. Network engineer would require a specific tool to do wardriving, that is to search for Wi-Fi wireless networks by a person in a moving vehicle. The tool could be installed inside a portable computer, smartphone or personal digital assistant. Some hobbyist does wardriving to exploit connections to wireless local area network around a city or elsewhere. There may also be a potential data leak if the wardriving tool used are bulky that would attract attention from passerby. This is because to do wardriving one needs a vehicle, a portable computer, a wireless Ethernet card set to work in promiscuous mode, and some kind of an antenna which can be mounted on top of or positioned inside the car. A small and non-bulky wardriving tool is more suitable in order not to attract attention. Traditionally, a network engineer still brings his notebook or laptop that is installed with Wi-Fi receiver for wardriving. We designed a portable wardriving tool, WarBox, that is smaller and non-bulky as compared to the notebooks or laptops that most engineers used. The device is built over the Raspberry Pi, a small, single-board computer. Our prototype includes the database for data collection of wireless data for further analysis. For example, the data could be used for wireless mapping and other trending usage by end users. We got the inspiration to build WarBox from the dedicated wireless analysis devices, like Netstumbler and Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE). However, we did not compare the WarBox performance with these tools as it is beyond our research objective. Our main objective is to build a wardriving tool based on the Raspberry Pi, which is affordable and customizable to most environments. Our result shows that the WarBox requires a low power consumption. It is powered by the 5V coming from the Micro USB port and it is using a battery bank to power it. We are able to detect 596 access points at Taman Setapak Jaya, a suburban area that is 8.4km away from Universiti Kuala Lumpur, City Campus.