Help Docs & Troubleshooting FAQ


Applications in the OSWA-Assistant™ wireless auditing toolkit require certain hardware such as wireless network cards or other hardware to be present in order to work (e.g. wireless cards, bluetooth dongles, etc). Please refer to the documentation contained inside the CDROM's root directory or click on the "Features & Tools" or "Supported Platforms" menu items above.


We've also prepared a small FAQ below which provides answers to common questions asked by users regarding the toolkit's operation or features. This is a list of compiled questions which both technical and non-technical users have asked to date. Hopefully it will help answer any questions you may have. If not, please feel free to write to us at: assistant-feedback [-at-] securitystartshere.org

Question: I am an IT-security professional and frequently have to do audits for both my and my clients' wireless networks. Can I use this toolkit for my work?

Subject to you getting prior permission to conduct the audit, sure! That's what it's meant for - to help wireless auditors do their job. The auditing tools loaded in the toolkit are, to the best of our knowledge, either GPL, public-domain, free or non-commercial (non-commercial meaning it's not to our knowledge sold commercially and has been made available by the developer for anyone to download and use) software. Unless the copyright owner of any tool notifies us otherwise that their tool does not meet any of the preceding criteria and they want us to remove it from the toolkit, the tools will continue to be available for any IT-security professional to use. The toolkit itself does have a legal restriction expressly forbidding you from conducting unauthorized audits on wireless networks which you are not authorized to audit but you definitely can use it in your workplace for legitimate, authorized work.

Question: Hey, I'm a home user running my own home wireless network. Can I use this tool to audit my own access point or wireless laptop?

Of course! One of the objectives is to allow home-owners and non-technical folk to audit their own wireless networks and prove to themselves whether they're vulnerable or not, so that they can take steps to rectify it. What you CAN'T do is use this tool to audit someone elses' network without permission from that someone else. Using the OSWA-Assistant™ legally binds you from doing any kind of unauthorized hacking. Also, the ActivityMap™ is designed to minimize a non-technical user's ability to use this toolkit to attack someone else while at the same time allowing the non-technical user to be able to audit his/her own network as close as possible to a realistic engagement.

Question: Hey, I found a copy of this CD on another website. Is it an official copy? Can I download and use it?

We recommend that you download only from sources that are officially listed on our official download page. The download links there are either from our official site or from people who have officially requested to mirror the toolkit on servers which they own. This minimizes (but, as with all things in real life, does not eliminate totally) the possibility of someone planting malware in the toolkit. No matter where you download the toolkit from, always run a MD5 check of what you downloaded and compare it against the MD5 hash which you can get from our official download page.

Question: My CD can't boot up! When I put it into my CDROM, my normal installed operating system gets displayed. This is the case even after I reboot my machine. Is the CD bad?

Sometimes, it takes a few seconds for a CD to be read by the CDROM drive and your computer may skip reading the CD if it takes too long or if the CD was placed in too late for the CDROM bootup read sequence. Place the CD inside the CDROM before you press the power-up button on your computer. Also. depending on your computer brand & model (and frequently if you're booting from an external USB CD drive), sometimes just rebooting (warm-boot) does not work. You need to do a cold-boot. Place your CD inside the drive, then physically power-off your computer. Then power up again.

Question: Help! I get a block of white space that fills half my screen before i reach the words that say "Press Enter To Continue". Is there a problem with the CD?

This only happens on some laptops with the "wide-screen" or 16:9 aspect ratio type of display. This is probably due to the non-standard dimensioned display warping the 8-bit graphic as it decompresses. It does not affect the functionality of the CD in any way. You just don't get the nice startup logo when you boot up.

Question: When the CD is loading, it hangs halfway around the "PCMCIA found, starting cardmgr" message. I can't seem to get beyond this message.

There is most likely a problem with detecting your BIOS as some computers have weird or unsupported BIOS functionality. To solve this, instead of pressing the "ENTER" key at the startup screen, press "F2", then type the following: linux noapic acpi=off pci=bios . Note that your computer will no longer be able to track your battery usage but at least you'll be able to use the toolkit.

Question: I get a popup box after getting to the GUI which says "Sound server informational message: Error while initializing the sound driver." Is there a problem with the CD?

No, the CD is just telling you that it can't open a particular component of your soundcard functionality. The component is listed in the next couple of lines immediately below the error lines mentioned above. Your auditing functionality is unaffected. Just click the OK button to carry on.

Question: Why does it take so long to get to the graphical display?

In order to fit everything on a single CD, the toolkit software is stored in compressed format which is decompressed to your computer's memory whenever it is accessed. Thus it will take longer than a normal, hard-drive based bootup simply because your CDROM is not as fast in grabbing the data for the decompression than your hard drive is in just accessing non-compressed data. However, it is actually not that long. Our lab testing shows that, from the time you press the "Enter" key to begin loading the CD, it takes an average of 2mins30secs to get to the graphical display, and a further 30secs approx to load the web-based intro page.

Question: Why does the interface feel so laggy and my CDROM drive makes a lot of noise?

See the answer to the question immediately preceding this question.

Question: %#@$%!! Why can't you just make it run faster ?!

Not if you're using a CDROM - everyone is constrained by optical drive technology. However, you can create a LiveUSB installation from the LiveCD image. Follow the instructions found here (substitute the references to "Knoppix " with "OSWA-Assistant"). If the webpage is no longer available, you can also view a PDF'ed backup here.

Question: What is the password for the default user (root) account?

There is none set at startup. This is in response to heavy user feedback requesting for such a setting. If you would like to add a password in order to lock your screen (maybe going for some coffee, etc), first open up a terminal and type the following: passwd root . Then enter in your desired password befroe locking the screen. Otherwise, you won't be able to unlock it and have to reboot.

Question: What kind of wireless hardware do I need to have to be able to run some of the software in the toolkit?

We've tested some chipset representatives for the 802.11, Bluetooth and RFID categories and the official hardware support information is located in the root directory of the CD. Please refer to the file called CD-SUPPORT-HARDWARE. For WiFi, generally the following modern chipsets which are being sold in stores today should work: Atheros, Intersil Prism54GT (fullmac only), Ralink RT2500, RT2570, RT73. Newer chipset support will be added as products using those chipsets become available on S.E.Asian retail shelves, subject to driver availability and us buying the hardware off-the-shelf as proof that they are indeed on store shelves! :)

Question: Hey, I really don't know how to read chipsets or identify equipment just by looking at it. Can you give me a list of hardware which I can buy off the shelf at my local computer shop?

The bottom line is that you should ALWAYS ask your computer shop staff about whether the hardware you are going to buy from them contains any of the chipsets mentioned in the CD-SUPPORT-HARDWARE file which is on the CD. When in doubt (and where funds are limited), then don't buy the hardware :)

Having said that, you can also visit our Supported Platforms page and have a look through the information there.

Question: I recently read an article involving installing the OSWA-Assistant™ on an SDHC card, for use with the Asustek EeePC. I've followed the tutorial and have even installed the OSWA-Assistant™ persistently, following directions from the OSWA-Assistant™ FAQ and pendrivelinux.com. Are there any plans to support the EeePC and the atheros-based wireless NICs installed?
(question from Paul Hallstein on 15 Aug 2008)

For the EeePC, we borrowed a sample (a black 12GB SSD EeePC900 version with webcam and bigger screen) to check it out and found that the onboard wireless card is the Atheros AR5007 model which, based on information floating around (e.g. http://madwifi.org/ticket/1296), appears to be actually a Zydas USB-based chipset that was rebranded under the Atheros name afer Zydas was acquired by Atheros some time ago. Thus, it is not supported by the madwifi-ng 0.9.3 driver installed in the OSWA-Assistant™.

When the madwifi-ng project team releases a driver which supports the AR5007 Atheros-rebadged Zydas USB-based wireless chipset, then we will likely upgrade the driver then. In the meantime, there is no official support for the EeePC's onboard AR5007 USB-based wireless chipset for the current OSWA-Assistant™ version 0.9.0.5e.

Question: I have been able to run the OSWA-Assistant™ on a Macbook Pro. It starts up and the OS runs. However, I am still not able to use any wireless devices. This is what I found on the (onboard) wireless card:
Chip Number: AR5008
Chip Description: Atheros 802.11a/b/g/n (pre-N) radio
It is a PCI-based wireless adapter.
(question from Adam Clampet on 18 Aug 2008)

According to public information, the AR5008 chipset will *NOT* be supported by the Madwifi-ng drivers until 0.9.5 (ref: http://madwifi.org/ticket/1001 - see the last milestone entry near the bottom of the page). We will assess the suitability of the 0.9.5 version of Madwifi-ng drivers for inclusion into the OSWA-Assistant™ when they come out. At this point, a solution would be to use a wireless card model which is specifically listed under our officially-supported hardware list.