KisMAC Developer Discontinues Project

mgv writes to let us know that the lead developer of KisMAC, a passive wireless network discovery tool for Mac OS X, is discontinuing the project. Michael Rossberg lives in Germany and that country has recently passed laws that would make his participation dangerous. He urges visitors to take a copy of KisMAC and its source as long as the site is up, so that development might be continued outside the US or EU. From the website: "There has not been a lot of time for KisMAC lately. However the motivation for this drastic step [lies] somewhere different. German laws change and are being adapted for 'better' protection against something politicians obviously do not understand. It will become illegal to develop, use or even posses KisMAC in this banana republic [i.e., Germany]."

Re:apple security?

[Anonymous Coward]

... Kismac doesn't break into Apples, it lets Apples passively monitor networks and has some basic attack functionality integrated. Your post might be [vaguely] on topic if this was a discussion about an Apple firewall, but for a passive wireless network stumbler? I don't think so...

The ignorant Arrogance of German politicans.

[SlashdotTemporaryAcc]

Because of its vagueness, this yet to be commenced, but already passed law is a severe threat to the German security community! Experts of different interest groups have repeatedly expressed their serious concerns, but the politicans - naturally knowing better than any expert can - decided otherwise. For more information, please visit: http://www.phenoelit.de/202/202.html [phenoelit.de]

Alternatives...

[fadilnet]

Though KisMAC is still out there, there are alternatives such as Airsnort, Airattack, WepLab, Web,.. Can a live CD such as this one http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1814#auditor [securityfocus.com] be booted off a macintelatosh?

Doesnt work in all Macs

[bananaendian]

He urges visitors to take a copy of KisMAC and its source as long as the site is up, so that development might be continued outside the US or EU

FYI: KisMAC doesn't work in passive mode in the latest ibooks with Atheros AR5008 chipset.

Re:Doesnt work in all Macbooks

[bananaendian]

Darn submit button! noticed that myself afterwards. I'm aware that on the older Macbooks (pre 2007) it works fine. But Apple has changed the chipset recently to Atheros and all kinds of problems have crept up, airport dropping connection and so on. It's understandable that KisMAC doesn't support it because its completely different chipset and they haven't updated KisMAC's hardware support after 2006.

Re:such a sad day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kismet.

Re:apple security?

[eiapoce]

Sirs,

Eventually you are missing the point. KisMac is a tool that can discover APs and Point to Point wireless network, Crack WEP, Crack WAP (given a dictionary) and make Injection Attacks with selected hardware (prism cards mostly). So it's just not a purely listening software neither limited to only apple basestations (Airport).

So long the problem is that Germany choose to make illegal tampering with telecomunications, which could be good, but eventually forgot to leave a exception of fair use for research pourposes which is not good.

Enrico

Re:Its a cracking tool

[muridae]

Just wondering, but what brain-dead IM service allows connections that don't go via SSL?

Well, that particular example was some time ago, but I believe it was AIM. I think that was back between '00 and '03 but if I tried to narrow it down someone would probably point out that I couldn't have used Kismet since it was only release last month or something.

Re:Its a cracking tool

[ukatoton]

MSN does not encrypt messages being transmitted at all, which I really hate, given it's popularity amongst friends of mine.

Re:Its a cracking tool

[Crayon Kid]

Just wondering, but what brain-dead IM service allows connections that don't go via SSL?

Umm, all of the most-used ones? AFAIK, Google Talk is the only one of the popular networks that does it, and that's because it's based on XMPP (Jabber).

Yahoo, MSN, AIM/ICQ, none of them have encryption. Whenever I find someone using Pidgin/Gaim I can convince them to install a plugin like gaim-encryption, but my buddies who use the official clients are sitting ducks (and me along with them).

Re:Replacement?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a VMWare Fusion (you could use Parallels too, of course) virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux with AirCrack-NG. It's a bit of a pain to set up, like anything Linux driver-related always is, but there are two big advantages over KisMAC. First, the cracking algorithms in AirCrack-NG are much better, having been updated more recently. You only need one tenth as many IVs to crack a network, making it practical in a short time basically wherever you are. Second, driver support, particularly for injection is much better. For instance, KisMAC has been hinting at injection support for Ralink USB devices for almost a year now, while it's already available in AirCrack-NG on Linux.