Wireless authentication required after setting wireless card to monitor

[TheRussianBear]

Hi there,

I have an HDD install of 64 bit Kali 1.0.8 with Gnome Fallback and 3.14 kernel. I've had a few issues with Kali because I'm learning, and botched up a few things having to result in me resintalling.. I've been having an issue with my wireless card for sometime now as it wasn't set up (I thought) for packet injection etc.

That's been resolved, my wireless card is capable of doing so:

IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:
Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.412 GHz Cell: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=15 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Packet injection was a success, after running the basic test.

I've enabled support for a wired network and am tethered to that at the moment after chaning the [ifupdown] in etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf to true as opposed to the standard false.

Whenever I've gone through enabling my wlan0 through airmon to change wireless card status to monitor, here's what I entered:

ifconfig wlan0 down
iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor
iwconfig (to check if card is now in monitor)
ifconfig wlan0 up to restart

Now my card is monitoring traffic and capable of still packet injection. Here's the weird part. I get disconnected 2 minutes later from my wireless network and cannot reconnect. Kali keeps saying: "Wireless Authentication Required" and has the password showing. I hit connect and it doesn't establish a wireless connection to my router. Other machines are able to connect to wifi no problem - it's just me.

What's more curious is that I was under the impression only a wireless connection would allow me to monitor traffic from all around me. Yet with a wired connection I'm able to pick up my neighbours wifi, example:

Ok change of plan I just tried an airodump-ng mon0 and I'm getting back nothing. I've entered sudo service network-manager stop / start and now I haven't got any wifi popping up in my connection bar at the top of the screen. It says under Wireless Networks - Device not ready.

Can someone enlighten me as to what it is I'm doing wrong?

Kind regards,

[TheRussianBear]

After some time of investigating the issue I've realised what the issue was.

Aircrack and the process of placing your card into monitor mode is INCOMPATIBLE with having internet access ath teh same time. Asking your card to listen to traffic as well as be in a state to inject data into a network point or something similar cannot be the case. It can be if you are using a separate card for internet, but you cannot use say - my Alfa to be connected to wireless and inject data; but you can have a separate card (internal card for example) and use that for internet.

I hope this will help anybody else who comes across this issue.