Projects

As part of the wireless research I am doing towards my MSc by research, I am working on the following projects

Wardrive comparison of Luton, UK. I did a survey of Luton in 2005 and I am now in the process of completing another war drive of Luton. The aim is to identify changes over the 6 years between the war drives to see what has changed, in particular I'm looking at the number of access points with no security to see if the home user have become more security aware. As part of this I have developed a series of python scripts that take the results for scans by viStumber and put them into a PostgreSQL database and the retrieve data depending on criteria and plot the results on Google earth using a custom set of icons to identify, channel, frequency band, security etc. and a KML file.

Development of an utility that sits in the notification area and monitors the number of wireless networks on each channel, this is to aid in the selection of channel to reduce collisions due to nearby networks on the same channel.

A series of war drives to monitor whether access points are being left on or being turned off when not in use. As part of this looking at developing a sensor that can be left running to monitor wireless network up/down time using a micro PC with wireless card.

I will also be doing some work on security testing of wireless networks and access points testing the encryption and features such as WPS to evaluate the tools and whether the videos on You Tube are acting as a good source of material for those wishing to abuse wireless networks.

Some of the software I an working may be made into open source tools and hence my interest in bitbucket and git.

There are a couple of ideas that I want to develop involving mobile wifi hotspots involving tablets, smart phones and the use of 3G dongles and security configuration. Especially since BYOD is becoming more popular, although this won't be part of my MSc by research I will be covering all my activities in wireless networking in this blog.