Weaponizing and Gamifying AI for WiFi Hacking: Presenting Pwnagotchi 1.0.0
This is the story of a summer project that started out of boredom and that evolved into something incredibly fun and unique. It is also the story of how that project went from being discussed on a porch by just two people, to having a community made of almost 700 awesome people (and counting!) that gathered, polished it and made today’s release possible.
If you want the long version instead, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Let me tell you: it’s going to be quite a long journey compared to my usual blog posts, but it’ll be worth it (i hope) and fun (i hope even harder).
This summer I spent ~3 months in the US and as most of the long trips I do, I had with me some basic wireless equipment for working and hacking stuff while going around. Among other things, I had my Raspberry Pi Zero W with PITA and an iPad i use for reading, emails but also as a screen for headless boards like that RPi when I want to have some portable bettercap installation without bringing an entire laptop.
PITA as an automated deauther and handshakes collector isn’t exactly what you’d define “smart”: the only thing it does is deauthing everything while bettercap is doing its normal WiFi scanning things in the background, every few seconds, constantly, while passively hoping for handshakes. I wasn’t even close to satisfied: there was a lot there that could be improved and instrumented with bettercap’s REST API, more attacks bettercap could perform that weren’t being used. So I quickly hacked together some python code to talk with the API and use the results in a smarter way. This ended up being the very first iteration of a faceless and AI-less Pwnagotchi.
