What is Kismet?

Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic.

Kismet identifies networks by passively collecting packets and detecting standard named networks, detecting (and given time, decloaking) hidden networks, and infering the presence of nonbeaconing networks via data traffic.

News

Thu May 29 2008 - Kismet-2008-05-R1 released. Lots of bug fixes all over the map (Darwin, GPS, Nokia, GPS handling, wrt54 broadcom, Imagemagick, assorted configure and compile fixes.)

Mon Oct 08 2007 - Spectools-2007-10-R1 is out. The evolution of the wispy-tools package, now supports the Wi-Spy 24x device, new UI, network streaming.

Features

Ethereal/Tcpdump compatible data logging
Airsnort compatible weak-iv packet logging
Network IP range detection
Built-in channel hopping and multicard split channel hopping
Hidden network SSID decloaking
Graphical mapping of networks
Client/Server architecture allows multiple clients to view a single
Kismet server simultaneously
Manufacturer and model identification of access points and clients
Detection of known default access point configurations
Runtime decoding of WEP packets for known networks
Named pipe output for integration with other tools, such as a layer3 IDS like Snort
Multiplexing of multiple simultaneous capture sources on a single Kismet instance
Distributed remote drone sniffing
XML output
Over 20 supported card types

Development Blog

For more detailed development information than the changelog or news provides, general wireless info and link-whorery, and other stuff, check out the development blog here.

Presentations

Presentations from various talks I've given are here.

Screenshots

Screenshots of the Panels UI and GPSMap mapping tool are here.

IRC

Stop by #kismet on irc.freenode.net.

WiSPY-Tools

The open source tools for the WiSPY Spectrum Analyzer are on the WiSPY page here