orinoco usb-pcmcia bridge + HostAP driver

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello!

On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 17:26 +0200, luca wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have a powerbook 12" without pcmcia slot and I have look for a good 
> device for wardriving .
> I have found Orinoco USB Gold and it works very good for passive 
> attack(kismet,airsnort) but I dont find a solutions for attive attack 
> (many use the HostAP driver support).
> 
> Is realy  possibile use the orinoco pcmcia-usb bridge with a prism card 
> with HostAP driver ?

You'll need to make HostAP work with USB devices.  The problem is that
USB is packet oriented.  The driver is not interacting directly with the
hardware.  Therefore, locking should be changed.  I know there was a
patch to support true Prism USB devices in HostAP, but the patch has
never been applied.  If you want to go this way, don't try Orinoco USB
bridges - they are less documented than Prism chipset.

> I have read in ML that :
> 
> You can also buy Orinoco *USB*, crack it open and put a Prism 2/2.5 card
> instead of the Lucent card that's inside.  Then try to merge orinoco_usb
> with linux-wlan-ng and load tertiary firmware on it.

That's more likely to succeed, but it has nothing to do with HostAP.
One possible problem is that no flashable tertiary firmware is publicly
available, whereas firmware download over the Orinoco USB bridge has not
been reverse engineered yet.

Once you get around this, remove parts of orinoco driver that don't work
with tertiary firmware, and you'll get a USB access point.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin