Hak5’s WiFi Pineapple is a penetration testing and security auditing tool for wireless networks. Here I want to talk about using the Pineapple for art — perhaps HACK.ART (or HAK.ART), in the manner of NET.ART. Fortunately, the Pineapple includes an API I can interface with my favorite digital arts medium, Processing, using the HTTP Requests for Processing library and a modification for JSON formatting (essentially, just save this file to the folder your Processing sketch resides in, which adds an addJson function you can see in my following example). To use the API, I first had to install the APITokens module on the Pineapple, and generate a token for Processing to use.
I have written a demo sketch that does the following:
- Send a JSON-formatted POST request to the Pineapple’s API to scan all access points within range of the Pineapple.
- Send another request to retrieve the results of the scan.
- Show the response data as a series of rectangles whose lengths are determined by the APs’ relative signal strengths, and whose colors are determined by the first three octets of their MAC addresses.
- Search the response for the occurrence of a particular MAC address, and if it is found, send a signal to an Arduino (which we could program to light an LED, sound a buzzer, or whatever; this would be more useful when including clients in the scan, but you get the idea).
If all you want is a bar chart or alert there are easier ways to make one (you could even write your own Pineapple module), but the Big Idea here, of course, is that you may do many kinds of creative things with these data.