Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Overview of this book

This book is for all mischievous Raspberry Pi owners who’d like to see their computer transform into a neat spy gadget to be used in a series of practical pranks and projects. No previous skills are required to follow along, and if you’re completely new to Linux, you’ll pick up much of the basics for free. We’ll help you set up your Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 and guide you through a number of pranks and secret agent techniques that are so inconspicuous yet high on mischief. You’ll learn how to configure your operating system for maximum mischief and start exploring audio, video, or Wi-Fi techniques. We’ll show you how to record, listen, or talk to people from a distance and how to set up your own phone network. Then, you’ll plug in your webcam and set up a motion detector with an alarm and find out what the other computers on your Wi-Fi network are up to. Once you’ve mastered the techniques, we’ll combine them with a battery pack and GPS for the ultimate off-road spy kit.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Use your phone as an access control device


We saw in Chapter 4, Wi-Fi Pranks-Exploring Your Network, how we could use our Raspberry Pi to scan the wireless networks to see what devices are around. Most smartphones come with either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or both, on them nowadays, which transmits an identifier unique to that device.

We can take advantage of that by using our phone as an access control device, so our Pi can know when we're nearby and act accordingly. For example, let's say if each time you were near your Pi with your smartphone, it could automatically unlock the encrypted container you set up in Chapter 5, Taking Our Pi Off-Road, and then lock it again when we're not nearby. By constantly scanning for our phone's broadcast packets, we can do this.

Probe Requests

When a smartphone is searching for nearby routers to connect to, it will periodically broadcast packets of data called Probe Requests. The Probe Requests contain the unique MAC address of the device and often the name of...