Marcelo Toledo

One of the systems I work on is VexBox, a multi-architecture Linux distribution for hotspots, it comes with all the softwares needed to serve a user, dhcp server, legitimate ARP Spoof, web server, radius client, etc.

For simple testing purposes it’s ok to open up a notebook, find the SSID, connect and do all your tests. But some times you need more then this, you need more users, more time connected and you might not have all the resources you need.

That’s when I came up with the idea of creating a hotspot simulator. For each client we use an Access Point (AP) running a modified version of VexBox.

Each one of them can be seen as a real user with a Wi-Fi enabled device, they will do exactly the same thing users does, it will navigate, download, idle, roam between APs, disconnect, reconnect and everything you can imagine.

We have projected and implemented a model to handle twenty simultaneous users, they are stored in two piles connected to two switches and one external power source with enough watts with an on/off button.

The main software controls the clients telling them what to do, find the SSID, try to get ip, authenticate, do some traffic, disconnect and so on.

It is written in Python and has a ncurses GUI so you can watch clients activities and control each one of them individually or globally. This way it can run in background or screen for months and can be accessed from any external network via a simple shell.

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