IMPORTANT:

• Please read and understand the following prior to using this page: Tutorial: Is My Wireless Card Compatible?
• Microsoft Windows and all variants are NOT officially supported at this point in time.
• See this FAQ entry if your question is “What is the best wireless card to buy?”.

This section deals with a three related areas:

• Compatibility of chipsets to the aircrack-ng suite
• Which drivers are required for each type of chipset and operating system
• Which wireless cards are known to work with the aircrack-ng suite

There are two manufacturers involved with wireless cards. The first is the brand of the card itself. Examples of card manufacturers are Netgear, Ubiquiti , Linksys and D-Link. There are many, many manufacturers beyond the examples give here.

The second manufacturer is who makes the wireless chipset within the card. This is the most important company to know. Unfortunately, it is sometimes the hardest to determine. This is because card manufacturers generally don't want to reveal what they use inside their card. However, for our purposes, it is critical to know the wireless chipset manufacturer. Knowing the wireless chipset manufacturer allows you to determine which operating systems are supported, software drivers you need and what limitations are associated with them. The compability section describes the operating systems supported and limitations by chipset.

You first need to determine what wireless chipset your card uses. This can be done by one or more of these techniques:

• Search the internet for “<your card model> chipset” or “<your card model> linux”. Quite often you can find references to what chipset your card uses and/or other people's experiences.
• Search the Forum
• You may also have a look at windows driver file names, it's often the name of the chipset or the driver to use.
• Check later in this page for cards known to work with aircrack-ng
• Check the card manufacturers page. Sometimes they say what chipset they use.
• Have a look at lspci -vv output for descriptions, PCI id and kernel modules used.

Here are some other resources to assist you in determine what chipset you have:

• Madwifi compatibility list
• Wireless Adapter Chipset Directory nearly the best resource for this kind of information
• Atheros chipsets based wireless 802.11a/b/g devices only Atheros-based cards
• WLAN Adapter Chipset Directory not up-to-date but still very useful
• Atheros Communications Total 802.11 Product Search
• Hardware Comparison with a lot of details.
• Overview and details about wireless adapters

Once you have determined the chipset, check the driver section for which software driver you need. Software drivers connect the operating system to the hardware. The drivers are different for each operating system. There are also notes regarding limitations.

If you are deciding on which card to purchase, check the “Which is the best card to buy?” section on this page. There are many considerations that should go into your purchase decision:

• Hardware compatibility with your existing equipment.
• Price and availability of the card.
• Availability of software drivers for your particular operating system and intended use of the software.
• How active is development for the software drivers you need.
• How much peer support and documentation is available for the card and software drivers.

It is not an easy decision to make. By considering these factors, it will help you make a more informed decision on what to purchase.

The best chipset nowadays is Atheros. It is very well supported under Linux, and also under Windows. Neither support any USB wireless devices. The latest madwifi-ng patch makes it possible to inject raw 802.11 packets in either in Managed and Monitor mode at arbitrary b/g speeds.

The madwifi-ng compatability list is an excellent way to determine if a card is compatible with the aircrack-ng suite. Atheros, the chipset manufacturer, also has a web page that enables you to lookup chipsets for products incorporating their designs.

The madwifi-ng driver is used for the atheros chipsets. This driver does not support any USB atheros devices. However, Atheros acquired Zydas which makes USB chipsets (zd1211 and zd1211b). Atheros has renamed this chipset to AR5007UG. The AR5007UG chipset is NOT supported by the madwifi-ng driver and is not a recommended chipset. (Starting with 2.6.23, AR5007UG can be used with zd1211rw.) Another USB chipset, AR9170, also shows some promise, with a test driver (ar9170, mac80211-based) being available.

Broadcom's “AirForce One” line of chipsets is recently catching up with Atheros in terms of Linux support. The new b43/b43legacy driver in 2.6.24 and up, when patched, can inject at speeds pretty much on par with Atheros. It also handles all attacks nicely, including fragmentation (although the underlying stack, mac80211, requires a patch to inject fragments). Current development versions of the driver can actually reach speeds higher than those possible with Atheros, often up to 700 PPS and over. Multi-VAP operation/concurrent monitor and managed interfaces, similar to the one seen in Madwifi, is also implemented through the underlying mac80211 stack.

Windows, on the other hand, is not supported, except for some older 802.11b-only chipsets.

Like Madwifi, b43 offers no support for Broadcom-based USB devices. For those, a separate driver called rndis_wlan exists, which doesn't support monitor mode (and will never do so, as the chipset has no raw mode). Draft-N devices are also not yet supported.

Ralink makes some nice b/g chipsets, and has been very cooperative with the open-source community to release GPL drivers. Packet injection is now fully supported under Linux on PCI/CardBus RT2500 cards, and also works on USB RT2570 devices. However, these cards are very temperamental, hard to get working, and have a tendency to work for a while then stop working for no reason. Furthermore, the RT2570 driver (such as that for the chipset inside the Linksys WUSB54Gv4) is currently unusable on big endian systems, such as the PowerPC. Cards with Ralink chipsets should not be your first choice.

There is one exception with regards to the Ralink chipsets. This is the RT73 chipset. There are excellent drivers with high injection rates for the RT73 chipset. Devices with the RT73 chipsets are recommended.

Cards containing the Realtek RTL8187L chipset work quite well and is recommended. The driver patch for this chipset has been continuously improved and quite good at this point in time. The Alfa AWUS036H is a very popular card for use with the aircrack-ng suite. This chipset is not to be confused with the RTL8187B, which is nowhere near as tested as RTL8187L.

Notes:

1. See this link link to determine the revision. It is very likely that other revisions will work with Windows and Linux. However, this is unconfirmed.
2. There are some cheaper models with a similar name (WG511 and DWL-G520+); those cards are not Atheros-based. Also, the Peek driver does not support recent Atheros cards, so you'll have to use CommView WiFi instead.

Note:

1. There is an earlier version of these cards called “WL-138g”, which is Marvell-based and thus unsupported.
2. 2.6.25.1 or newer kernel is required if you want to use this card with b43.
3. Netgear WG311 v1 is likely compatible (Atheros). Revision 2 is experimental (ACX chipset). Revision 3 (Marvell) is unsupported. See http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/Compatibility/Netgear#WG311.
4. See this thread for important considerations. See this link for the card details. Part number: 40Y7026.
5. This card has a soldered-in external antenna, with the wire between the card and the antenna easily pigtailable to RP-SMA.

Notes:

1. See this thread message comments on this device.
2. See this thread for pictures, links and other information.
3. Netgear WG111: This Netgear support page describes which serial numbers are for each version of the card.
4. See zd1211rw for the limitations.
5. WUSB54GC v1 is silver-colored, v2 is white, v3 is black.

All prism2 or prism2.5 on this wireless card support page can inject.

New laptops now normally come with ExpressCard slots. The current problem is that there are not a lot of ExpressCard wireless cards which are compatible with the aircrack-ng suite. However, ExpressCard to PCMCIA/Cardbus adapters have appeared in the market.

The question has always been “Will these adapters work correctly with the aircrack-ng suite”. There has been at least one success story. Read this thread for the details.

If you try any adapters, please post your findings (good or bad) to the forum. This is very important so that everyone can benefit from the experiences of others.

Here is a list of adapters that people have reported as working successfully:

• Addonics ADEXC34CB ExpressCard 34 Cardbus Adapter