Matt Daubneys Blog

Last weekend myself and the missus took a drive around my village logging all the access points my laptop could see. I did this using Kismet (in the Ubuntu Repos) and a bluetooth GPS module through gpsd. I did this for two reason. Firstly, I was greatly interested in what percentage of people in the village did not have any encryption on their wireless internet. Secondly, Open Street Map was severley lacking any decent maps of the village.

Driving around took a few hours (largley because the first time I went around I’d misconfigured Kismet..), and it took me maybe an hour to put that information into Open Street Map, and maybe 2 hours to analyse the data sufficiently. Here are the results from the access point survery;

First, the encryption data:

Encryption types used on Access Points in Inkpen

As we can see, a large chunk (22.43%) of access points logged do not have any encryption on their wireless internet. This is very bad as anyone can easily see anything they send to or recieve from the internet. WEP is almost as useless as having no encryption as it can easily be broken.

Wifi Channels used in Inkpen (subtract 1 from legend)

This second graph shows us the distribution of channels used in wireless networks in Inkpen. The majority of people use channel 1, 6 or 11. This may be to do with manufacturers standard settings.

Manufacturers of Chipsets in Access Points logged around Inkpen

This last one was just an aside really. The data for this probably isn’t that accurate, but it doesn’t surprise me that most access points have a Cisco chipset.

Either way, I thought it was an interesting way to spend a morning. Especially for the improvements made to Open Street Map, almost as an afterthought!