April 2005

April was the second month of face-to-face (f2f) training phase among the IT@AB specialists. Among the various activities that happened this month, there were not only the normally training sessions, but also extra-activities, such as the war driving in Lörrach and the Evaluation in Cologne. The goal of this paper is to give the reader an overview of these events that took place during this month.

War Driving in Lörrach
In terms of media in use, the computer local area networks can be divided in two groups, the wired and wireless based networks. As the name implies the wired networks use some sort of tangible media and the wireless use the atmosphere. The advantages of wireless local area networks (WLAN) are mainly centralized in mobility and scalability (easier to expand), and the disadvantages are related to rather poor or complicated security mechanisms and rather lower speeds compared to the wired. However because of the referred advantages they are being adopted internationally in homes, offices, conference rooms and also in public places such as restaurants and airports.

The main purpose of the war driving is first to raise awareness on the participants about the rapid proliferation of the WLANs and to analyse the security issues around the implementation of such kind of networks.

At the Lörrach Berufsakademie we have been welcomed by Prof. Dr. Axel Sikora who immediately started the session by giving a seminar about WLANs with focus to their security aspects. The presentation was outstanding since it started by introducing the technology in the context of the OSI Networking Model, described different kinds of implementation of those networks and the different WLAN products in the market, and finally it payed focus on the security aspects. After the presentation has finished, the instructions for the rest of the day were given. The group and the tasks were divided into two. The group division was done in such a way that there was a mixture of the African students, German students and the professionals. The subgroups were supposed to perform the following tasks one after another:
- The first task was to install a WLAN, with 128 bit WEP enabled. Afterwards some people connected regularly to the network and produced traffic (through pinging and/or browsing through the AP). The others were suppose to capture the traffic using a wireless sniffing application like Airsnort. After capturing the traffic, they were supposed to attack the WEP password using a mechanism called brute force.
- The last but not least task, was the war driving itself. This task began with a short presentation about installation of the required tools (Kismet and GPS drivers) by Marcello. The kismet tool's function was to identify the existing WLANs and save the description in a log file or database, and the function of the GPS device was logging in real time the location of the APs.

As soon as all the laptops were equipped with kismet running over Debian Linux and a few of them equipped with kismet and a GPS device, the war drive began. Although it was a quick tour (approximately 15 mins), an average of 200 APs (both encrypted and non-encrypted) were discovered along the drive.
Marcello opened the afternoon session explaining how the log files captured in the war driving could be used. He also presented the tools that could be used to try to compromise the discovered wireless networks. At this point of the day, the participants were slowly

Evaluation
During this month we were also invited by InWEnt to Köln where we took part in the Zwischenevaluation of the whole It@ab program. The aim of this evaluation was to get the point of view of the participants namely us on how we felt about the whole programme in general. Various discussions were held on how and where we felt things should change and how we felt about the training and how life in Germany was for us. The evaluation process was conducted during two days in the Inwent Head offices. The event was very productive as we had a chance to give our point of views on the issues at hand as well as having a chance to enjoy the beautiful city called Köln.

This was the biggest and unusual events that took place during the month of April, please stay tunned as we conclude the f2f training next month and hopefully get started to the practical internships.

At the Lörrach Berufsakademie we have been welcomed by Prof. Dr. Axel Sikora who immediately started the session by giving a seminar about WLANs with focus to their security aspects. The presentation was outstanding since it started by introducing the technology in the context of the OSI Networking Model, described different kinds of implementation of those networks and the different WLAN products in the market, and finally it payed focus on the security aspects. After the presentation has finished, the instructions for the rest of the day were given. The group and the tasks were divided into two. The group division was done in such a way that there was a mixture of the African students, German students and the professionals. The subgroups were supposed to perform the following tasks one after another:
- The first task was to install a WLAN, with 128 bit WEP enabled. Afterwards some people connected regularly to the network and produced traffic (through pinging and/or browsing through the AP). The others were suppose to capture the traffic using a wireless sniffing application like Airsnort. After capturing the traffic, they were supposed to attack the WEP password using a mechanism called brute force.
- The last but not least task, was the war driving itself. This task began with a short presentation about installation of the required tools (Kismet and GPS drivers) by Marcello. The kismet tool's function was to identify the existing WLANs and save the description in a log file or database, and the function of the GPS device was logging in real time the location of the APs.

As soon as all the laptops were equipped with kismet running over Debian Linux and a few of them equipped with kismet and a GPS device, the war drive began. Although it was a quick tour (approximately 15 mins), an average of 200 APs (both encrypted and non-encrypted) were discovered along the drive.
Marcello opened the afternoon session explaining how the log files captured in the war driving could be used. He also presented the tools that could be used to try to compromise the discovered wireless networks. At this point of the day, the participants were slowly

by Alberto Muchanga and Lionel Thobias