Angelina Tsuboi's ESP8266-Powered WiCon Kit Wants to Help You Keep Your Wi-Fi Network Safe

Developer and self-described "tinkerer" Angelina Tsuboi has designed a compact device for testing out and actively improving the security of Wi-Fi networks, built around an Espressif ESP8266 microcontroller: the WiCon Kit.

"The WiCon Kit is a compact and portable Wi-Fi reconnaissance suite based on the ESP8266," Tsuboi explains of the gadget, "that contains a Packet Monitor with 11 filter types, De-Authentication and Disassociation Detector (HAXX), and a FTP Honeypot utilizing Canary Tokens."

The first of the gadget's feature-set allow for network monitoring across a given Wi-Fi channel, capturing packets for analysis and filtering out packets that are not of interest at a given time; the second can be left running to protect a network from de-authentication or disassociation attacks, which cause devices to drop off the network and provide valuable data for attacks against network keys; and the last acts as an FTP server but sends out an alert should someone attempt to connect.

The open source design, which builds on earlier work by "Spacehuhn," Alex Lynd, and Kody Kinzie, uses an ESP8266 development board connected to a perf board with two tactile buttons, a compact 128×64 OLED display panel, and an LED for HAXX attack alerts — requiring a minimum of hardware to keep things affordable and compact, pocket-friendly in both senses.

The software, which is written in the Arduino IDE, is still a work-in-progress with Tsuboi actively expanding the device's capabilities to include a web server and data logging in Comma Separated Values (CSV) format.

More information on the WiCon Kit is available on the project GitHub repository, where the schematics and source code are made available under an unspecified open source license.