kelixin / probr-core

The core-component for generic WiFi tracking: remote device management, packet capturing, packet storage

Probr - A generic WiFi tracking system

With the vastly increased number of wireless enabled devices, the large amount of data produced by its packets contain large opportunities for usage in research and daily life. By passively listening to wireless signals, it is possible to gather information that can be used to answer interesting questions. This project aims at developing a system, which helps researches, developers and engineers collecting such data for analysis tasks.

It is a master student research project at the Communication Systems Group of the Department of Informatics, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

probr-core

The probr-core project provides the core functionality for setting up devices for WiFi sniffing, managing them remotely and actually collecting and sniffing WiFi probe request packets.

Technology

The frameworks, languages, tools and technologies used and required in the probr-core project are:

• Python 2.7
• Django
• Bower
• PIP

Devices

The devices used for sniffing WiFi packets must fulfill the following requirements:

• *NIX operating system or simliar (Debian, Ubuntu, OpenWRT, Mac OS X, Raspbian etc.)
• wget installed
• tcpdump installed
• internet access
• wireless interface with monitor mode capabilities

Installation

We highly recommended to use Virtualenv to manage the python environment for probr-core.

After cloning the project, create a virtual environment for probr outside the probr-core directory:

virtualenv .env_probr

Activate the virtual python environment:

source .env_probr/bin/activate

Go into the probr-core directory. Now install the python dependencies of the project:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now, install the frontend and web dependencies using bower:

bower install

You're pretty much set to start probr-core at this moment. What is left to do is:

Create the DB tables:

python manage.py migrate

Create an admin user for the Django webproject:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Start-up

Finally, you're ready to start your probr-core server by running:

python manage.py runserver

And you can check it out by visiting http://localhost:8000.