23.05 : no more wash/reaver by default

For Developers
1

Found that those famous hack tools no more work since 23.05 release.
The reason is dropping of wireless extensions support from kernel

here is my fix :

package/kernel/mac80211/Makefile
config-y:= \
	WLAN \
	CFG80211_WEXT \

config/config-kernel.in
config KERNEL_WIRELESS_EXT
	def_bool y

it's easy to test if kernel has support for wext. use iwconfig from wireless-tools
2devs : It would be good to have configurable option in menuconfig !

2

Isn’t it already?
# CONFIG_KERNEL_WIRELESS_EXT is not set

As another byproduct, this seems to stop /proc/net/wireless being populated (which was just a subset of /proc/net/dev, but helpful).

3

iwconfig has been deprecated for many years. OpenWrt supports the creation of mode monitor interfaces directly in UCI.

1 Like
4

Nobody cares about iwconfig.
But reaver is useful. Current openwrt does not support reaver. It's present in distribution but useless. It's verified and cured. In 22.03 it worked.

5

This sounds like an issue that should be reported on github

6

Reaver calls this

ioctl(5, SIOCSIWFREQ, 0x7fd11328) = 0

this ioctl seem to be the part of wireless extensions
if not supported :

ioctl(5, SIOCSIWFREQ, 0x7fdffb78) = -1 EOPNOTSUPP (Not supported)

and no output from 'wash'. reaver also does not proceed as it should
hcxdumptool does not work at all

so, disabling wext has it's price. is it worth saved space ?

7

Would it be possible to bring back wireless extensions in the default kernel? This was present in 22.03 and was dropped in 23.05. I know this was most commonly used with the now deprecated iwconfig, but it was also used with the reaver package which is now unable to function using standard images. I did find this post that outlines the issue and the fix:

I was able to follow the workaround and had success in building custom images, but it then makes any kmod package incompatible without having to go compile each module from the customized build system. Having deployed dozens of devices and over a half dozen device types/architectures, this becomes pretty administratively heavy. I can absolutely understand and appreciate keeping our images lean by removing things that are no longer thought to be used, but I do not believe this is the case for wireless extensions for those of us in the InfoSec community. The amount of space saved without this option appears to be very minor and on many devices, the kernel has it's own partition, so saving this space does not always return it for other packages or other usage.

Please consider this for the 24.10 release and beyond.

Thanks!

8

You might want to make a new post in the For Developers section.

I moved the thread.

9

The other possibility: Fix reaver! See:

10

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