Mana Tutorial: The Intelligent Rogue Wi-Fi Router

“Mana” by Dominic White (singe) & Ian de Villiers at Sensepost, is an amazing full feature evil access point that does, well, just about everything. Just install and run it and you will in essence receive Wi-Fi credentials or “Mana” from heaven!

Here is a link to the creator’s Defcon 22 presentation:

Not sure where to start with this one. Like other rogue Wi-Fi AP programs Mana creates a rogue AP device, but Mana does so much more.

It listens for computers and mobile devices to beacon for preferred Wi-Fi networks, and then it can impersonate that device.

Once someone connects to the rogue device, it automatically runs SSLstrip to downgrade secure communications to regular HTTP requests, can bypass/redirect HSTS, allows you to perform MitM attacks, cracks Wi-Fi passwords, grabs cookies and lets you impersonate sessions with Firelamb.

But that is not all; it can also impersonate a captive portal and simulate internet access in places where there is no access.

Mana is very effective and, well, pretty scary!

Before we get started, for best success use Kali Linux v.1.08.

And as always, this article is for educational purposes only, never try to intercept someone else’s wireless communications. Doing so is illegal in most places and you could end up in jail.

Mana Tutorial

** UPDATE ** – 10/21 – You can now install Mana in Kali by simply typing “apt-get install mana-toolkit”!

1. Download and unzip Mana from https://github.com/sensepost/mana.
2. Run the install script kali-install.sh.

Mana will then install libraries and other dependencies to work properly.

Once completed the install places the Mana program in the /usr/share/mana-toolkit directory, config files in /etc/mana-toolkit, and log files and captured creds in /var/lib/mana-toolkit.

3. Open the main config file /etc/mana-toolkit/hostapd-karma.conf

Here you can set several of the options including the default Router SSID which by default is “Internet”. Something like “Public Wi-Fi” may be more interesting. The other main setting here is “karma_loud” which sets whether mana impersonates all AP’s that it detects or not.

Lastly, all we need to do is run one of Mana’s program scripts located in usr/share/mana-toolkit/run-mana. The scripts are:

• start-nat-simple.sh
• start-noupstream.sh
• start-nat-full.sh
• start-noupstream-eap.sh

For this tutorial let’s just run Mana’s main “full” attack script.

4. Attach your USB Wi-Fi card (TL-WN722N works great).
5. Type “iwconfig” to be sure Kali sees it.

6. Type, “./start-nat-full.sh” to start Mana.

Mana then starts the evil AP, SSLstrip and all the other needed tools and begins listening for traffic:

Once someone connects, Mana will display and store any creds and cookies detected as the victim surfs the web.

7. When done, press “Enter” to stop Mana

To check what you have captured run firelamb-view.sh to view captured cookie sessions:

This asks which session you want to try from the captured cookie sessions. It then tries to open the session in Firefox. If the user is still logged in you could take over their session.

You can also review the log files manually in /var/lib/mana-toolkit.

Mana works equally well against laptops and mobile devices. And the inherent trust of “preferred Wi-Fi networks” that most systems use makes this tool very effective at intercepting and impersonating wireless routers.

To defend against this type of attack turn off your wi-fi when not in use. Be very careful of using free or public Wi-Fi networks. Also, it would be best to perform any secure transactions over a wired LAN instead of using Wi-Fi!

If you enjoyed this tutorial and want to learn more about computer security testing, check out my new book, “Basic Security Testing with Kali Linux 2“.