Kismet on macOS Catalina

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Kismet is another Wireless tool that is capable to capture WPA handshakes wireless troubleshooting and many more. I have a similar write-up about Bettercap on macOS you may want to check [1]. Unfortunately, you can’t search and install via HomeBrew you should build on OSX directly, but requires some libraries to be installed.

Prerequisites

I assume you already have Brew [2] on your macOS. I installed Xcode from App Store also. Next I installed packages using Brew.

brew install pkg-config libmicrohttpd python3 libpcap protobuf protobuf-c pcre librtlsdr libbtbb ubertooth libbtbb libusb libwebsockets openssl

Edited (2021–02–15)

It depends on your OpenSSL version. You probably need to define variables explicitly before compiling Kismet.

Like this example below:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/lib/pkgconfig"
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/include"

After installation you will see information.

Compile from Source

Clone Kismet source code [4]

git clone --recursive https://www.kismetwireless.net/git/kismet.git

Configuration

cd kismet
./configure

Compile Kismet. It will take longer.

make 

An installation procedure

sudo make suidinstall

Running Kismet

kismet -c en1

You can access the Web interface using the browser you will be prompted to create an account. Don’t credential in plain text are located under your home directory ~/.kismet/kismet_httpd.conf :)

http://localhost:2501

Reference

#1 https://medium.com/@tomas_savenas/capturing-wpa2-handshakes-on-macos-catalina-pwnacintosh-5b023afbaa97
#2 https://brew.sh
#3 https://www.kismetwireless.net/docs/howto/osx/
#4 https://www.kismetwireless.net/git/kismet.git