Demo: Nexmon in Action: Advanced Applications Powered by the Nexmon Firmware Patching Framework

Smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are widely available and offer interfaces for wireless communication. This makes them perfect candidates for large-scale wireless testbeds. To reduce energy consumption, those devices contain FullMAC Wi-Fi chips. They run proprietary firmwares that abstract from low-layer mechanisms on the data link (MAC) and physical layer (PHY). This hinders researchers to influence their operation and evaluate new communication schemes on off-the-shelf devices. Using our Nexmon firmware patching framework, we gain access to chip internals to extend their functionalities by writing patches comfortably in C. In this work, we use a Raspberry Pi 3 to offer workshop attendees a hands-on experience on how to get starting with Nexmon by extending the firmware of the Pi's Wi-Fi chip. Additionally, we use Android smartphones to present our wireless penetration testing app based on monitor mode and frame injection patches, as well as our reactive Wi-Fi jamming app based on patches to the Wi-Fi chip's real-time processor. The demonstrations show how easily Nexmon enables us to implement even complex applications in a Wi-Fi chip resulting in very low processing latencies and low energy consumption. As open-source projects, all our demos can be reproduced by fellow researchers in their own laboratories by using widely available off-the-shelf hardware.