Kismet on the Santa Rosa chipset MacBook

I purchased my MacBook right after the release of the newer Santa Rosa chipset models in late 2007, and I have to say, it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned.  I moved to doing most of my security-related work on it, from my Latitude C400, much quicker than I expected.  I’m very happy with it.

The other day, I wanted to get Kismet up and running on OS X, which I thought would be a pain, since the newer MacBooks use a Broadcom 4328 for wireless.  KisMac is an option, as well (with some nice additional features!), but I have a long history of using Kismet in Linux and wanted to be able to use and demo it as well.  I figured I might have to resort to using an external USB wireless adapter.

As it turns out, it’s really not that difficult at all, and supports the 4328 very well in OS X.  I took notes on the commands I used, since I expected more problems than I ran into.  I think you’ll find it to be pretty straightforward:

First of all, you’ll need to install the XCode tools from the OS X install discs, so that you have an environment to compile the code.  I decided to create a directory under “/opt/” for kismet to live in, in case I needed to compile some libraries especially for it (I expected to need a newer version of pcap, but this was not the case).  This part’s up to your taste.  You may not find it necessary:

mkdir /opt
mkdir /opt/kismet
mkdir /opt/kismet/src
cd /opt/kismet/src

Next, check out the latest development version of Kismet from the Kismet SVN:

svn co http://svn.kismetwireless.net/code/trunk kismet-devel

Now, switch to the directory with source, and run configure.  You’ll want to set the prefix if you set up a special place for Kismet to live, like I did:

cd kismet-devel
./configure --prefix=/opt/kismet/

Compile, and install:

make dep
make
sudo make install

The configuration’s pretty easy as well.  Edit the kismet.conf file (in this case, at “/opt/kismet/etc/kismet.conf”).  You’ll be making two simple changes.  Kismet wants to drop privileges to a user’s level, so look for this part of the config and change it:

suiduser=<your OS X username>

…and set up your capture source:

source=darwin,en1,airport

That’s it, really!  You can run it with “sudo /opt/kismet/bin/kismet” (might want to add it to your path).  It works very well too.  I’ve noticed that I can stay associated to an access point, while sniffing and hopping channels with Kismet.  This is better than what I could do with my old Intel 2200.

I went into the installation figuring I would make a blog post about getting it running.  I never expected it to be so easy, so this post might not even be needed!  Maybe it’ll at least let folks know ahead of time that there’s smooth sailing ;).