Sunday, July 29, 2007

R.I.P. KisMAC?


It seems that the very popular wireless scanning tool for OS X, KisMAC, has hit a very serious roadblock. The primary developer, Michael Rossberg has halted the project due to restrictive changes in German law. He provides the following explanation:

There has not been a lot of time for KisMAC lately. However the motivation for this drastic step lies somewhere different. German laws change and are being adapted for "better" protection against something politicians obviously do not understand. It will become illegal to develop, use or even posses KisMAC in this banana republic (backgound: the change of § 202c StGB).
While I cannot do much about that for now, you probably can. Make copies of KisMAC and its source as long as the website is up! Do further development outside of Germany, even better outside the US and EU! If you are a German resident, you will need to fight for your rights.

From the KisMAC mailing list, it appears that work is underway to host the KisMAC elsewhere. However, its highly questionable how much additional development effort on long awaited features such as packet injection on Ralink-base USB devices, will now be made given the loss of the primary developer. As a security professional with a Macbook Pro as my primary platform, this is especially painful. Has anyone else out there discovered viable alternative wireless tools for the MBP?


2 comments:

Trevor said...

Sucks. There isn't much else that does RFMon in OSX that I know of. Know of another app that will do this in OSX?

Looks like I'll be booting to that auditor CD...

Mestizo said...

Yeah.. I wanted to try my Backtrack CD, but I am a bit leary of "monkeying" around with my EFI partition..


http://refit.sourceforge.net/