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I need to teach some students about cracking WEP and WPA passwords, as I don't have a real wireless router to use, is there any VM that I could use to simulate a wireless network? Like a Virtual Wireless Router?

I tried to use airbase-ng on my Kali Linux, but it's proven to be kinda confusing (for some reason, other machines can never connect to the network). I also tried to setup a windows machine, but it only allows to share internet with WPA2 (not open network nor WEP)

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  • No, VM only emulate wired networks and wired network cards and don't offer the interface needed to simulate a wifi card. See also google: virtual machine simulate wifi
    – Steffen Ullrich
    Feb 19, 2017 at 19:25
  • Even if I use an external wireless card? like a TPlink 722N or something?
    – Ricardo Reimao
    Feb 19, 2017 at 22:52
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    There's nothing virtual about your WiFi if you use actual WiFi hardware to generate an actual WiFi signal that travels through the actual air :). I think both me and Steffen thought you wanted something to simulate a network in software only?
    – Marcus Müller
    Feb 19, 2017 at 23:19

3 Answers 3

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You can!

Linux has a pretty versatile WiFi driver framework for WiFi cards that do most of the WiFi handling in software (most of the cards these days).

A top of that framework (mac80211) the individual device drivers talk to the cards.

Or, a dummy driver, https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/mac80211_hwsim , talks to an internal virtual card. You can have arbitrarily many of those attached to the same virtual ether for simulation purposes.

You could run a hostapd impending an access point on one of these virtual cards, and simulate arbitrarily many other cards that use that virtual WiFi. Tadah! Wrap all in a script, and deploy to the students' Linux PCs. They all get their own virtual networks simulated on their own PC.

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If you want you can use windows. Microsoft included a virtual Wi-Fi feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that lets you connect to a normal wireless network and at the same time create a virtual wireless network with that same wireless adapter. However, you must use a command-line tool called Netsh to create and manage the virtual router, which Microsoft calls a Wireless Hosted Network. There are third-party programs to help configure this functionality with a GUI (as discussed in the next section), however we'll first review the commands.

First, you'll want to enable the Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) feature of Windows 7 so the Internet access is shared with users on the Wireless Hosted Network.

Open the Network Connections window, right-click the network adapter that's connected to the Internet and select Properties. Then select the Sharing tab, check the Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection, choose the network connection name of the Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter from the drop-down box, and click OK.

Now open the Command Prompt: click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt.

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  • Thanks for the answer, that's also a good idea for people that wants networks with WPA2. As far I researched, there was no way to create a WEP network or a Open Network on a windows environment.
    – Ricardo Reimao
    Feb 23, 2017 at 11:16
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The easy way : You can use the powerful tool create_ap , posted on this git repo , to create an Access Point to simulate a wifi network.

It can be installed on linux systems as follows (after installing the required dependencies )

git clone https://github.com/oblique/create_ap
cd create_ap
make install

The create_ap tool allow you to create an AP from same wifi network (practicable) and from ethernet connection.

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