Wireless Hacks

Running Kismet on Mac OS X

Run Kismet natively on OS X using the Viha AirPort driver.

When I wrote the Kismet Hack [Hack #31], the Kismet crew was still looking for someone to work on making the Viha AirPort driver for OS X work with Kismet. Interestingly enough, support for OS X has just been introduced into the CVS tree of Kismet and works quite well. Note that as of this writing, Kismet works with the original AirPort cards, but not with the new AirPort Extreme cards. I’m sure it will support them once an appropriate driver is available. Here is what you need to do to get Kismet running under OS X.

First, you need the Viha AirPort driver from http://www.dopesquad.net/security/. Download the 0.0.1a binary, unpack it, and install the driver:

root@caligula:~# tar zxf Viha-0.0.1a.tar.gz
root@caligula:~# mv Viha-0.0.1a/WiFi.framework/ /Library/Frameworks/

If you have ever run KisMAC [Hack #24], then it has already installed the driver for you, and you can skip this step.

Next, download the Kismet source from http://www.kismetwireless.net/download.shtml. You can either use cvs to grab a current copy of the source tree, or use the handy patch at http://www.kismetwireless.net/code/kismet-devel.diff.gz to bring an existing 2.8.1 tree up to the CVS revision. (This is one way to do it if you don’t feel like fiddling with CVS.) Assuming that the kismet-2.8.1.tar.gz archive and the kismet-devel.diff patch are in your home directory:

root@caligula:~# tar zxf kismet-2.8.1.tar.gz root@caligula:~# ...