From Rexploit

               <===============================>
	         || Types of Wireless Cards ||
		 ||            by           || 
		 ||    William M. Hidalgo   ||
		 ||  redkommie<@>gmail.com  ||
		 ||         12/20/04        ||
	       <===============================>


.: Contents :.

    I. INTRODUCTION
          - About

    II. THE CARDS
          - Prism
	  - Orinoco
	  - Cisco Aironet


.: INTRODUCTION :.

[-=] About [=-]

This paper will give a brief explanation over the Prism, Hermes/Orinoco, and 
Cisco chipset cards. Wireless cards based of these three chipsets will be
the most useful cards you will use.


.: II. THE CARDS :.

A variety of 802.11 chipsets exist which include Cisco, Prism, and
Hermes/Orinoco. There is a listing of brand name cards and what chipsets they
are based off on in the Wireless section at http://www.redkommie.net.

[-=] Prism [=-]

The line of Prism cards are the most versatile and well supported cards that
you can use under Linux. The freely available documents on the Prism chispet 
allows developers more flexibility on developing programs and drivers for the 
chipset. Many variants of the chipset exist which are:

    Prism I          - 802.11        
    Prism II         - 802.11b
    Prism III        - 802.11b
    Prism GT         - 802.11b/g
    Prism Indigo     - 802.11a
    Prism WorldRadio - supports the 802.11a, b, d, g, h, i, and j standards
    Prism Duette     - 802.11a/b
    Prism Nitro      - 802.11g

A good sized selection of open source programs and drivers exist for Prism
based cards. The Prism 2 and 2.5 chipset based cards are the ones you will need
to use traffic injection programs such as file2air and void11. The standard 
Prism driver is the Linux-wlan-ng. Besides it three other drivers exist:

    Airjack - used for layer 2 attacks 
    HostAP  - used to set Prism card into access point mode, used for tools
              such as void11
    Prism54 - driver for the new line of GT, Duette, and Indigo Prism chispets,
              similar to the HostAP drivers

A very useful Prism 2.5 card is the Senao SL-2511CD Plus EXT2 with two external
MMCX antenna connectors.

[-=] Hermes/Orinoco [=-]

Created by Lucent these cards have an excellent receive sensitivity and good
set of drivers under Linux unfortunately Lucent provides very little information
over the cards for developers to program applications and drivers, but the
current driver (orinoco_cs) is quite good and support among existing programs
is good also. These cards work very well with an external antenna attached.

The two most popular Hermes/Orinoco cards are:

    - Orinoco Silver
    - Orinoco Gold

The newer 'combo' cards by Orinoco are not based on the Hermes/Orinoco chipset. 
A modified Orinoco Gold card with a RP-SMA external connector can be purchased 
from http://www.toxicranch.com. It is far more robust and better quality than 
a pigtail connector

[-=] Cisco Aironet [=-]

The Aironet cards are based of the Prism chipset. They are well supported by 
Cisco to run under Linux as they provide drivers and a configuration utility.
These cards are excellent at monitoring traffic across all channels since
the channel hopping is done at the firmware level so no software is needed
to have the cards traverse all channels. The Air-LMC350 is a useful card
as it comes with two external antenna connectors. The Aironet cards are
excellent for site surveying and detecting rouge access points.