Beacon8r

As seen at DefCon 26 in the Hardware Hacking Village - Saturday at 5pm.

Here are my DefCon 26 Slides

Why

To make people giggle and stress test wifi analyzer tools. Also rick rolling might be involved. Also to inspire people to get into playing with ESP8266's.

Info

The top main part is made up of 44 ESP8266's -WeMos D1 Pro mini's to be exact. Some versions come with antennas so that's what I got. The secondary part is 13 NodeMCU ESP8266's which are sturdy units with lots of pinouts.

This project pushes roughly a million unique SSIDs every minute. In theory. Real numbers in the next few weeks. It uses 44 ESP8266's and each one is advertising almost 3k SSID's every 6-8 seconds for a total of 130k unique SSID's every 6-8 seconds with unique MAC addresses per SSID and each SSID get's a numeric suffix.

That's what the main unit on top does. In the top there are 44 ESP8266 each hooked up to one half of a usb to mini power splitter cable into an anker powered usb hub running off of mains. I checked and wiring them all up 12 volt out to 12 volt in of hub wasn't much of a power savings. Weight savings would be worth it though.

The secondary unit on bottom in the flat box broadcasts a rick roll, the trevor memorial project and some books.

FYI you can use emoji's as access point names, just not in the main unit section.

So there is a total of 57 ESP8266's here and when all powered up it draws 46-49 watts. Yes lithium ion batteries are much lighter but I didn't have time/money to go with Li-ion for it all. Plus, the usb battery packs I got in bulk for this weren't up to the job so instead of ordering more I went lead acid.

Unit

Action Shot

Notes

NodeMCU modules tend to be less power hungry than WeMos D1 mini Pro's But I don't have hard data to back that up. Just a gut feeling and a couple data points.

If you re-create this - don't put antennas so close to your body and especially don't use more powerful antenna's unless you know what you are doing.

Also, don't run something like the main unit in a normal wifi area. The antenna's aren't that powerful but a bunch of them near a 2.4 ghz only device might muddy the water. It did crash someones phone when they were using a wifi analyzer but I don't know phone brand or app version/name. I did manage to crash a wristband esp8266 based wifi access point lister/enumerator that one person was wearing.

I was able to connect to a different person's access point who was standing right next to me because his access point had a 9db antenna.

In general when you are playing with these use judgement and keep them a bit away from your body. I wouldn't power one up and put it in your pocket but that's just me.

Attributions

I tried to note in each file where I borrowed/adapted code from. I'll take the blame for the python code though.

How much does it weigh?

Too much.