Ready to Power Your Application!
Complete Visibility on Your Wireless Networks with AirPcap and Wireshark
The AirPcap adapter, together
with the Wireshark Network Analyzer, gives you a detailed view of your 802.11
traffic, including control frames
(ACK, RTS, CTS),
management frames
(
Beacon, Probe Requests and Responses, Association/Disassociation,
Authentication/Deauthentication) and
data frames
. The captured frames
include the 802.11
Frame Check Sequence
,
and it's possible to capture frames with an invalid FCS to spot remote access
points with a weak signal.
802.11 in Wireshark
You will be able to specify the capture channel and see all the traffic it
carries, even if the channel is shared by multiple
access points.
The AirPcap adapter can capture on any of the 802.11b/g channels: from
1 to 14 .
This means complete visibility in any region. Moreover, this makes it a perfect solution for rogue access point detection.
With transmission disabled, the AirPcap adapter is
completely passive.
This guarantees non-intrusive monitoring of your wireless network.
Advanced Wireless Settings in Wireshark
The AirPcap adapter can be configured with one or
more WEP keys, so that you will have the option to see (and filter on) unencrypted traffic in Wireshark.
Furthermore, using Wireshark, it is also possible to decrypt packets that have been encrypted with WPA and WPA2.
In this case you will need to capture the authentication with the access point of the host for which you want to see the cleartext packets.
Note that the so-called "WPA Enterprise" encryption standard is not supported.
The AirPcap adapter captures per-packet power and rate information.
This is useful for mapping your network, detecting weak signal areas,
and measuring the transmission efficiency of the stations.
Monitor Multiple Channels Quickly
and Conveniently with AirPcap and Wireshark
When monitoring on a single channel is not enough,
multiple AirPcap adapters can be plugged into a hub or your laptop and used to capture traffic simultaneously on different channels.
The AirPcap driver provides support for this operation through our Multichannel Aggregator (MCA) technology,
that exports multiple AirPcap adapters as a single capture stream.
Other solutions implement multi-channel monitoring using a single radio and
channel-hopping. This means that you are monitoring each channel only part of
the time, missing important packets.
Multiple AirPcap Adapters in Wireshark
The AirPcap 3-Pack will get you up-and-running in a multi-channel environment
The AirPcap 3-Pack includes three AirPcap adapters, a USB 2.0 4-port hub,
and The Network Toolkit (Single Download).
This enables you to take full advantage of the Multi-Channel Aggregator
technology that conveniently aggregates the packets from multiple
channels as if they were coming from a single capture device.
The AirPcap 3-Pack gives you full coverage for up to three
channels (e.g. 1, 6, and 11), 100% of the time.
Portable and Versatile
An external USB-based solution is a big advantage for wireless
network analysis:
-
You can put it in your pocket, or
quickly move it from your PC to your laptop.
-
Multi-channel wireless analysis and
logging is simply a matter of plugging two or more AirPcap adapters into
your laptop or your USB hub.
-
You don't need to interrupt your laptop's
wireless connection while your network analyzer is running.
To increase versatility even more, AirPcap and
Wireshark come with support for all the major Windows operating systems,
either 32-bit or 64-bit.
Easy to Setup and Easy to Use
You will start working in seconds,
thanks to the integrated driver and software installer that
configures your system and
installs Wireshark.
The AirPcap Installer
You will be able to perform
common operations (e.g. changing
the capture channel) from
the Wireshark toolbar,
thanks to the Wireshark user
interface extensions provided by
CACE. Alternatively, a user-friendly external configuration panel can be used with any other application.
The AirPcap Control Panel
All the Performance You Need
The AirPcap Classic adapter and
driver take full advantage of the 480Mbps bus bandwidth of USB 2.0,
guaranteeing high transfer rates even in the most demanding situations.
The driver takes full advantage of the same architecture that makes WinPcap
an industry standard, including kernel-level packet buffering and
filtering, aggressive copy minimization, and system call reduction.
Ready to Power Your Application!
The open, powerful and well documented
AirPcap API is designed to be used in any application that needs low-level
access to 802.11 wireless networks. Its integration with WinPcap makes it
possible to add wireless support to your application with minimal effort for
you and your customers.
In order to cut your development time,
CACE provides a free developer's pack (get it from the downloads section below), which contains:
-
The include files and the libraries
needed to interface with the AirPcap adapters
-
Comprehensive online documentation
-
A set of ready-to-compile example
programs, that demonstrate every feature of the API, and its integration
with WinPcap
Example Program from the Developer's Pack
The AirPcap developer's pack supports both
Visual Studio 6/2003/2005 and the GNU/Cygwin compilers. The latter allows
easy portability of Linux and UNIX applications.
CACE Technologies is pleased to offer SDKS and other developer support for
its products to both Open Source and traditional software developers. Please
contact us for details at
info@cacetech.com.
