First of all, this library is designed to be easily extendable. \
There's an architectural/contribution guide in docs/Frame.md and pull requests are highly welcome.
Covering the whole spectrum of possible 802.11 frames or all different implementations of wifi tools out there is an impossible task for a single person, let's try to tackle this together!
The first goal of libwifi is to provide a convenient way of parsing raw IEEE 802.11 frames!
The emphasis is on convenient, since this library doesn't focus on providing a ultra high-performance implementation. The focus is rather on providing an easy-to-use API. \ This includes consistent and intuitive structs representing the structure of a given frame. \ However, this doesn't mean that this library isn't quite fast anyway ;).
The second goal is to provide an unified API to: 1. query information about your wifi interfaces (iwlist equivalent). 2. set attributes and configure your wifi interfaces (iwconfig equivalent).
As a prototype it's planned to call and parse existing binaries. However, a native re-implementation of those tools is desired in a long-term manner. \ For instance, the wireless-tools are a great C-library with a lot of documentation and very will structured code. This could be used as a guide-line for re-implementation.
The project is still under heavy development, and a lot of features are missing, but it should be a good foundation for a proper wifi library :).
Parsing a frame is fairly straight forward:
``` use libwifi::parse_frame;
let bytes = [ 180, 0, // FrameControl 158, 0, // Duration 116, 66, 127, 77, 29, 45, // First Address 20, 125, 218, 170, 84, 81, // Second Address ];
match libwifi::parse_frame(&bytes) { Ok(frame) => { println!("Got frame: {:?}", frame); } Err(err) => { println!("Error during parsing :\n{}", err); } }; ```
A full example on how to capture, process and parse wifi traffic can be found in the examples directory.
There are a few benches in the benches folder.
cargo-criterion by calling cargo install cargo-criterion.cargo criterion.Right now, parsing a Beacon frame, which is one of the more complex frames, takes ~1 µs on a i7-8550U. \
Parsing a Data frame takes ~84 ns.
If we take this as a rough guideline, you can roughly expect a million frames per second.
Disclaimer: This will most likely become slower, as more missing features/parsers will be added to the library. Anyhow, I don't expect this to drop below 100k frames/s.
Parser and Frames
StationInfo struct.Interface handling
I would love to add proper interface handling to the library. This includes features to:
There's a lot more to the IEE 802.11 spec and a lot of stuff needs to be done. \ If you find that something you need is missing, consider creating a ticket and contributing :).