DEPRECATED - Tutorial: How to install Aircrack-ng on La Fonera

February 12, 2007
By: SonicvanaJr

To start off the Fon, or La Fonera router is a small wireless router that is sold to the customer at a relatively low price ($30) provided that the user agrees to connect the Fonera to their internet connection, and provide free internet to those who want it.

The Fon company seems to live to give their routers away for free sometimes.

I have personally seen, and taken advantage of three different instances where they have given away routers. So if you're broke, or cheap. Just wait around for their next “have a router on us” event :)

The device itself is based on the Atheros AR2315 chipset.

Characteristics:

• 5V @ 2A power supply
  
• 1 ethernet jack
  
• RP-SMA antenna connector
  
• serial port
  
• 16MB RAM
  
• 8MB Flash
  
• SPI-Bus

The Fon is able to run the OpenWRT Kamikaze image, and can thus run various pieces of software that are ported to it. Including the Aircrack-ng suite.

Over the past month of so I have fabricated various power supplies for the fon, since a power outlet is not always available.

Since it runs on five volts the options to power it are almost limitless.

So far I have build a car power adapter, USB power adapter, and a power adapter that uses two 9V batteries.

The car, and 9V battery adapters both used a 5V voltage regulator available from Radioshack. Part number 276-1770

Basically this takes an input voltage up to 35V, and drops it down to 5V. However since the laws of science apply in our world the lost energy has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is out of the regulator in the form of heat, so in layman's terms these get VERY hot after a bit of use.

For the USB adapter it was as simple as connecting ground to ground and positive to 5V+ on the USB cable.

I'm not going to go into wiring specifics since all of it is VERY basic stuff, however if you need help feel free to contact me.

The first step to get Aircrack-ng running on the Fon is to get the OpenWRT image on it first.

Please note to be able to do this you either need a Fon that has SSH enabled.

Tutorial/Guide here. This only works on Fons with firmware 7.0 r4 or below, though at the time of writing [2/12/2007] these people claim to have a way to enable SSH on newer firmwares.

If your Fon is not capable of being SSH'd into then you can use a serial console to flash the image as well.

Instructions for building your own image, and various other bits of information about the Fon and OpenWRT can be found here

• cd ~

• svn co svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk/ trunk

• svn co svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/packages/ packages

• You can then later update either of those by going into either the trunk or packages directory, and typing

  svn up

• Go into trunk/package directory and create a symbolic link from the packages tree to the trunk/packages directory

   cd ~/trunk/package 

•  ln -sf ../../packages/*/* . 

• Now go into the trunk directory, and type

   cd ~/trunk/ 

•  make menuconfig 

  • Make sure that “Target System” is “Atheros AR231x/AR5312 [2.6]”

(X) Atheros AR231x/AR5312 [2.6]

• Make sure the Aircrack-Ng package is selected in the Network section as a module.

Network  ---> 
<*> airpwn........................................... Packet injection pwnage (NEW)
    wireless  ---> 
<*> aircrack-ng................ next generation of aircrack with new features (NEW)
<*> aircrack-ptw............. A tool using a new method for breaking WEP Keys (NEW)
<*> kismet-drone................................................ Kismet drone (NEW)

• Make sure the libpthread package is selected in the Libraries section as a module.

Libraries  --->
<*> libpthread-stubs........................................ libpthread-stubs (NEW)

• Exit out of the kernel configuration, and be sure to save your changes.

• Go to the trunk directory and type

  make

Now that all of this is done you should have some files in your bin directory.

• openwrt-atheros-2.6-vmlinux.lzma
• openwrt-atheros-2.6-root.jffs2-64k
• Some others (don't worry about them)
• A package directory containing the aircrack-ng ipk file, and libpthred ipk file

Now you need to flash your Fon with the OpenWRT image. There are two ways to do this currently, one is to use the serial interface on the Fon, and the Redboot boot loader to flash a image, or you can ssh into the Fon and flash via the OpenWRT shell.

SSH and serial console guide can be found here

However in the ssh guide replace the files they use with the one I provided, or that you have built. If you built them substitute their wget commands with scp commands to get your image files into the /tmp directory.

Once you have successfully flashed your Fon boot it up, and ssh into it. Default login “root”, password “admin”

Now you need the aircrack-ng and libpthread ipk files. They can be found here or if you built them you should have no problem getting them over to your fon at this point.

Use the command

ipkg install <file name here>.ipk

for both of the files.

You now have the Aircrack-ng suite working on your Fon.

Also note that you need to use the wlanconfig tool to create a monitor mode interface. I suggest putting this into a script, and then putting said script into your PATH so that you can setup a monitor mode interface quickly.

 wlanconfig ath create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode monitor 

Enjoy

If you need help I can be found in the Aircrack-ng IRC channel.

However, if you're lazy, or just don't feel like you can do this you can download the image files at this site

Please understand that these packages are provided as is.