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Comment by mikehollinger | Hacker News Reader

Special gear isn't all that expensive. From a cursory view of the video and a skim of the paper, they're using hostapd, which means that they simply need a wifi adapter with a sufficiently-good driver. Anything with the RTL8188CUS seems to be pretty nice (that's what I'm using in a raspberry pi project, myself).

So - I agree with you that there's a barrier to entry, but it's not that big of a barrier.

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Agreed. Not specialized equipment. Just something that lets you shoot raw frames and run as a WiFi AP. I have 2 such USB WiFi dongles in my bag for setting up such environments.

Give: http://www.tp-link.com/us/products/details/cat-5520_TL-WN722... a shot. It will let you setup an AP in a VM easily, etc. It is our currently anointed dongle for VM hosted MiTM setups.

I haven't tested it, but it should work fine if they are just using mods to hostapd.

Note that there are two versions of that dongle. The version 1 has Atheros Chip[1] with the best wi-fi support but version 2 has a Realtek chip[2] with subpar support. AFAIK it isn't possible to get version 1 of the dongle today.

My suggestion is Alfa AWUS036NHA (The last three letters are important!) which has AR9271 chip with great support with the ath9k driver.

[1]: https://wikidevi.com/wiki/TP-LINK_TL-WN722N

[2]: https://wikidevi.com/wiki/TP-LINK_TL-WN722N_v2

[3]:http://www.ebay.com/itm/ALFA-AWUS036NHA-802-11n-Wireless-N-W...

Hmmn, I wasn't aware. I will have to check and see, but it is probably I have a v1, since I have had it for a while. It has always taken a bit of effort and hunting to find WiFi cards with good chipsets that support monitor mode and AP modes painlessly (for WiFi frame capture, etc.).

Thanks for the info... I am a little disappointed, the ones we have been using are all very reliable and worked out of the box, so we must have the Atheros ones. It also seems impossible to order the older version specifically.

>It also seems impossible to order the older version specifically.

Yep. I've been trying for a while, but couldn't be sure if what I was looking at was version 1. Especially since the Alfa alternative is bulkier.

Arch Linux Wiki and Amazon comments are sometimes the best resources for hardware compatibility and reviews. Sort of amusing.

Also, confirming, everyone even as recent as a few months back seems to have gotten a 1.0 or 1.1 version, but newer ones are now 2.0

https://imgur.com/a/jcnbE (one from my bag).

On second read, timing requirements arent a thing if you are spoofing the network (obviously) so for that attack vector you don't need specialized hardware. (wont let me edit :( )

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