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Monitor Mode For Broadcom Wifi Chipsets


JZL

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The problem with broadcoms is most of them don't natively support monitor mode, and from the looks of it, they claim to be updating the actual firmware on the phone to enable this feature. its not merely a driver subset to enabled features in the default chip, but an actual firmware change, which in my mind, is kind of taking chances on trusting a group that you don't know what is in the actual firmware update or code. If they made it opensource, and you could see all the code and compile it yourself, then I would say go for it, but right now, they have the driver already set (ko file which is an ELF file) and the bin file, which is the firmware changes. Without seeing the underlying code that made them its kind of hard to trust whats in it.

https://code.google.com/p/bcmon/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fbundles is their google code base, but its all zipped driver and bin files, no actual source code to look at. You'd have to decompile these to see whats really in them. There is a tool to do that for the bin file, called binwalk http://code.google.com/p/binwalk/ but I'm also not a programmer, and wouldn't know what to look for with respect to if they added rouge code. If the phone doesn't offer it out of the box, then you are taking your chances adding code you don't know what its actually doing. Most projects like this, offer you the ability to make and compile from source, so you know what you are getting into ahead of time. Just sounds risky to mess with a phones firmware, when you don't know what other little gems they added in there, like rootkits or such. And just because its on google code, doesn't mean it couldn't contain anything malicious. I also don't see anything in the shell script that loads it, to backup the original files, so once you make the switch, good luck reverting if you wanted to put things back to the original drivers and firmware.

Edited by digip
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