Re: RFMON detection

[Austin Godber <godber () uberhip com>]

captgoodnight () acsalaska net wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 July 2004 07:45 am, hax wrote:
>
> > > Curious; is it possible to remotely detect a sniffing wireless card
> > > that's in monitor mode?
> >
> > The short answer is: no, it isn't.  RFmon mode is simply making the
> > card act like a radio, picking up all that's in the air.  Because of
> > this, sniffing with RFmon will show you all the packets going by
> > without you being connected to any AP.  You can't detect this, it's
> > like asking if you can detect someone tuned to a certain radio
> > station.  
>
> Perfect analogy.

Actually, you can detect what radio stations people are listening to.  I 
remember seeing it on the news that someone was collecting statistics on 
what radio stations people were listening to in their cars.  This was in 
the Phoenix area.  I will post more info once I find it again.

Although it might be hard to use this to detect intruders on wireless 
networks.  It would really depend on what mechanism makes it possible.

You can also identify a particular transmitter based on some minute 
differences in how it transmits.  This is called RF Fingerprintging and 
is used or was used by the cellphone companies to defeat cloning.  There 
was also an article in Monitoring times a year or two ago about it.  I 
thought this might be an effective method IDing wireless users.  And 
actually, it might (emphasis) might be applicable to the technique used 
to detect what receivers are tuned to.

Maybe if you can RF Fingerprint a receiver you would have something ... 
but that really depends on how everything works ... and I forget at this 
point.  I will try to find the physics.

Austin

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