Book Image

Building a Pentesting Lab for Wireless Networks

By : Andrey Popov, Vyacheslav Fadyushin, Aaron Woody
Book Image

Building a Pentesting Lab for Wireless Networks

By: Andrey Popov, Vyacheslav Fadyushin, Aaron Woody

Overview of this book

Starting with the basics of wireless networking and its associated risks, we will guide you through the stages of creating a penetration testing lab with wireless access and preparing your wireless penetration testing machine. This book will guide you through configuring hardware and virtual network devices, filling the lab network with applications and security solutions, and making it look and work like a real enterprise network. The resulting lab protected with WPA-Enterprise will let you practice most of the attack techniques used in penetration testing projects. Along with a review of penetration testing frameworks, this book is also a detailed manual on preparing a platform for wireless penetration testing. By the end of this book, you will be at the point when you can practice, and research without worrying about your lab environment for every task.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Building a Pentesting Lab for Wireless Networks
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Choosing appropriate components


Under this topic, we are going to decide which lab components can fulfill the tasks determined in the previous topic.

As it is not always easy to get enough budget and hardware to build a penetration testing lab in an enterprise environment and even harder to do it at home, we are going to use virtualization and free software as much as possible in this book. That decision influences the next topics significantly, because it sets additional requirements for a lab.

Virtualization has also another significant advantage—flexibility to quickly modify the lab environment content according to current tasks by simply turning virtual hosts on and off.

For a virtual lab, you will need a computer powerful enough to run three to four virtual machines at the same time. We would recommend having at least four cores CPU and 8 GB of RAM. Additionally, you will need at least 150 GB of free space on a hard drive. Of course, if you have a bigger hard drive and if it is an SSD...