
Time for action – configuring your wireless card
Here we go! Follow these steps to connect your wireless card to the access point:
- Let's first see what wireless networks our adapter is currently detecting. Issue the command
iwlist wlan0
scanning
and you will find a list of networks in your vicinity:Keep scrolling down and you should find the Wireless Lab network in this list. In my setup, it is detected as
Cell 05
; it may be different in yours. The ESSID field contains the network name. - As multiple access points can have the same SSID, verify that the MAC address mentioned in the preceding
Address
field matches your access point's MAC. A fast and easy way to get the MAC address is underneath the access point or using web-based GUI settings. - Now, issue the
iwconfig wlan0 essid "Wireless Lab"
command and theniwconfig wlan0
to check the status. If you have successfully connected to the access point, you should see the MAC address of the access point in theAccess Point
: field in the output ofiwconfig
. - We know that the access point has a management interface IP address
192.168.0.1
from its manual. Alternately, this is the same as the default router IP address when we run theroute –n
command. Let's set our IP address in the same subnet by issuing theifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
command. Verify the command succeeded by typingifconfig wlan0
and checking the output. - Now let's ping the access point by issuing the
ping 192.168.0.1
command. If the network connection has been set up properly, then you should see the responses from the access point. You can additionally issue anarp –a
command to verify that the response is coming from the access point. You should see that the MAC address of the IP192.168.0.1
is the access point's MAC address we noted earlier. It is important to note that some of the more recent access points might have responses to Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request packets disabled. This is typically done to make the access point secure out-of-the-box with only minimal configuration settings available. In such a case, you can try to launch a browser and access the web interface to verify that the connection is up-and-running:On the access point, we can verify connectivity by looking at the connection logs. As you can see in the following log, the MAC address of the wireless card
4C:0F:6E:70:BD:CB
has been logged making DHCP requests from the router:
What just happened?
We just connected to our access point successfully from Kali using our wireless adapter as the wireless device. We also learnt how to verify that a connection has been established at both the wireless client and the access point side.
Have a go hero – establishing a connection in a WEP configuration
Here is a challenging exercise for you—set up the access point in a WEP configuration. For each of these, try establishing a connection with the access point using the wireless adapter. Hint: check the manual for the iwconfig
command by typing man iwconfig
to see how to configure the card to connect to WEP.
Pop quiz – understanding the basics
Q1. After issuing the command ifconfig wlan0
, how do you verify the wireless card is up and functional?
Q2. Can we run all our experiments using the Kali live CD alone? Can we not install the CD to the hard drive?
Q3. What does the command arp –a
show?
Q4. Which tool should we use in Kali to connect to WPA/WPA2 networks?