Kismet Wireless

New release: 2019-08-R2

2 minute read

Kismet 2019-08-R2 is here!

Building on some of the reports from running the new code in the Defcon environment, 2019-08-R2 has a large focus on simplifying the threading system and solving deadlocks under extremely busy conditions.

  • The entire IO stack now uses a single thread per object (pollable, buffer, buffer dispatch, and final protocol element now share a single mutex), which should minimize the ability for multiple IO events to conflict.
  • Packets are now processed by a single thread instead of a thread per CPU core; with the new views-based optimizations a packet processor can no longer hold a lock on a device while searching related devices. It’s unclear how much multi-threading the packet processing actually helped due to contention between device locks.
  • TCP server now generates a unique pollable object (and associated mutex chain) for each remote datasource connection; previously it used a collective mutex for all TCP IO and processed data in the TCP server object, breaking the one-lock-per-io-object-chain model.
  • Massive refactor of all methods and classes to unify a consistent naming convention w/in the code using snake_case_naming. Over the previous 20 years or so the codebase ended up with a mix of CamelCase, Upper_Case, and snake_case_names.
  • Some jankiness in the UI as to how it handled channel setting datasources; it should now be much more reliable to lock a source and change channels via the UI.
  • Some jankiness in the UI as to how it handled cloaked SSIDs and empty SSIDs full of spaces.

New features and improvements

  • Overall less RAM used high-device-count environments thanks to new field aliasing internals that allow aliasing the last-beaconed and last-probed SSID records instead of copying the SSIDs. When handling tens of thousands of devices, every byte counts.
  • Tunable buffer sizes via ipc_buffer_kb and tcp_buffer_kb for extreme low-memory systems (like the Pineapple Tetra and other OpenWRT devices); this can reduce the base memory requirements from 2MB/datasource to significantly less.
  • Introduction of kismet_package.conf which allows packagers to include platform-specific overrides without clobbering the user-controlled kismet_site.conf file.
  • 802.11e / QBSS associated station and channel usage columns in the UI; to enable them go to the ‘Hamburger menu’ in the top left, Settings, Device List Columns.
  • Python3 packages now renamed to python3-kismetxyz instead of python-kismetxyz, and the ‘replaces’ option is flagged to automatically deprecate the old packages.
  • New WIDS alert for the Qualcomm extended capability vulnerability reported at Blackhat.

Known bugs

  • Adding a column to the device view can break being able to click on a device to get details. This can be worked around by refreshing the web page after adding the device column and saving your settings.

Download

You can get the 2019-08-R1 release from the Kismet downloads page.

Packaging

If you’re looking to package Kismet, have a look at the packaging guidelines.

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