Kismet Newcore RC1 Released

Just a little while ago, dragorn released RC1 of Kismet-Newcore, the much-awaited next-generation of Kismet. From the release news:

After 5+ years of development, this staging release is to work out any final minor issues before a full release. Kismet-2009-05-RC1 is expected to be fully functional, so please report problems on the forums or via email. Please read the new README and replace your configuration files, as just about everything about configuring Kismet has changed (for the better!) The old Kismet tree also sees a new release as Kismet-old-2009-05-R1, which incorporates minor fixes and support for some of the newer Intel and Ralink cards/driver names. Both are available from the download page.

Kismet-Newcore Screenshot

Kismet-Newcore Screenshot

I’ve been moving away from using Kismet-Stable to the Kismet-Newcore architecture. On my short-list of awesome-new-features in newcore are:

  • Plugin architecture makes it easy to add new functionality (passive and active) which promises to introduce significant new features on a more regular basis, not the least of which are support for DECT sniffing, live Aircrack-PTW WEP cracking and (coming soon?) ZigBee sniffing;
  • Improved security model using suid-root group-exec-only interfaces;
  • Lots of greater functionality in capture sources including improved channel hopping controls and graceful interface termination with dynamic interface adding (no more exiting Kismet to add or remove an interface from use);
  • Save state feature where you can resume a previous capture state by running “kismet -r” on the runstate file;
  • New menu-driver Kismet client interface which shows you the interesting information at a glance;
  • Lots of new alerts and informational events help you in analyzing and assessing networks.

The development leading up to this release has been long in coming, and cheers to dragorn for continuing the introduce awesome new features that push the edge of what this powerful tool can do.

Take a look at the new Kismet-Newcore and enjoy this gem of the open source community.

-Josh