Wi-Fied: An Educational Platform for Hands-On Wi-Fi Security

Wi-Fi networks are as popular as ever and find daily use in private households as well as in corporate environments.
Awareness around vulnerabilities and dangerous exploits in wireless communication networks is vital to understand the security implications of operating such infrastructure securely.
The Wi-Fied Platform is a modular, Python-based demonstration tool developed to support and enhance the practical education of Wi-Fi security concepts.
This work presents the design and implementation of the platform as a complementary tool to existing theoretical content, enabling learners and IT professionals to gain hands-on experience with wireless network vulnerabilities and exploits, utilizing Raspberry Pi's for physical lab-setups.

Inspired by prior research into the classification and impact of Wi-Fi security threats, Wi-Fied supports a controlled, extensible environment for experimenting with attacks within an isolated lab setup.
The architecture of the platform follows a structured design, aiming to facilitate future development.
Rather than offering a standalone or comprehensive solution, the Wi-Fied Platform is intended to enrich existing curricula by bridging the gap between academic study and applied understanding of Wi-Fi threat scenarios and mitigation techniques.

The architecture of the Wi-Fied Platform evolved iteratively alongside its implementation, enabling flexible adaptation to specific requirements; such as the generation and transmission of Wi-Fi packets.
As a result the Wi-Fied Platform project produced a base for future expansion, already providing central functionalities like packet creation, automation of lab-device setups, and a unified CLI-based user interface.
Many of the challenges encountered during the project stemmed from library-specific implementation details, ambiguities in Wi-Fi standard definitions, or evolving requirements driven by feature progression.

In conclusion, building a robust but simultaneously flexible and extensible tool with critical dependencies towards physical hardware, Wi-Fi standards, and dissimilar runtime environments is not trivial.
However, the practical benefits of an auxiliary tool to enrich existing curricula by bridging the gap between academic study and applied understanding of Wi-Fi security are advantageous.
Future work may include but not be limited to the expansion of exploit scenarios and feature sets for packet manipulation, the support of more complex exploit demonstrations with real-time actions, and the addition of a graphical user interface.