I am currently working on an application that should be able to detect wifi devices in the area. I have been successful in detecting these devices using Kismet, which lets me find all APs and clients (associated or not) in the region. However, besides detecting these devices, I also wish to know their signal strength to try and pinpoint their position at a given time. The only way I seem to be able to monitor this is using the kismet_client (which I do not want) and in real time it shows me the current power levels.
Since I need to feed this data to an event manager (in Java) which will be running in an automated fashion I would need some way to capture it, other than looking at the screen… (for example, if something triggers an event near a sensor, I would like to know which device it was, assuming it was the closest one to trigger it, and the closest one having the highest signal strength).
Does anyone know of a way to log/capture the latest RSS value seen using kismet_server only?
Thank you.
ps. if not using Kismet, please suggest some other tool to use in Linux.
I am currently doing this by checking the kismet netxml log file periodically. This log file presents signal information under the “snr-info” tag. To retrieve these values I am using the java SAX parser. Don’t know if this is the most efficient way, but seems to be working so far.