Monitor wireless traffic, doesn't need to be decrypted or anything ?

Projects General Guidance
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I've gotten a little bit of advice on this so far, including using WireShark or TCPdump. I'm curious if there are any ready-to-use options or something that works on Mac. I need to view network traffic as a series of bytes/bits, which I will represent with LEDs in real-time. E.g., a byte goes over the network that looks like 01100110, and 8 lights in a row light up if they are a 1, stay off if they are a 0.

Thoughts?

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Yes, this is for my own network. I'm not sure how to assuage any suspicion that I'm using this maliciously, but I was hoping that by asking how to do it without decrypting any sensitive information that might do the trick. It's for an art project, and as of now I can't reveal much more than that. There is no function here, just curiosity and a critical concept.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Given the speed of data on a network, it's going to look like a blur anyway.

And I suspect that in between packets, it is going to show the same value of a terminal "sync" character.

Not the classic "blinkenlights" effect really.

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Thanks for the friendly note :slight_smile:

I wonder if I could ignore sync characters, then?

I've stumbled upon the Carnivore Processing library that might do the trick, though I suspect that you're right about the blinking effect not manifesting. There must be a way to cut out the more mundane syncs and handshakes and whatnot, the noise, to sieve out some signal.

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prismspecs:
I need to view network traffic as a series of bytes/bits

At what protocol level of the network are you working? Are the packets you want to monitor being sent wirelessly to/from a specific host, or are you trying to monitor traffic to/from multiple hosts? Are you able to run software on all the hosts that you want to monitor traffic to/from?

I haven't use Wireshark on a Mac but it ought to be possible to simply run Wireshark from the command line with suitable filters and output format specification and then just use text processing of the output stream to recognise when relevant packets have been detected. Presumably when that happens you'd want to send a message to the Arduino to tell it to do something with the LED.

I'm not sure how good Wireshark is with Wifi - at one time it was pretty poor but I think it's improved now. If you can't get it to work, you might find that Firesheep is easier to get working.