Hardware

wifisting is honest about hardware. Modules that need a radio you don't own will name what's missing rather than returning an empty result, so a silent no-op is a bug rather than an expected outcome.

Wi-Fi adapter that can inject — essential

This is the one that matters. Most modules do nothing without it.

Tested: Atheros AR9271 — the chipset this was built against. Available as TP-Link WN722N v1, Alfa AWUS036NHA, Technoethical N150.

The AR9271 is 2.4 GHz only. For 5 GHz you need something else, and the driver situation varies — check that your card supports monitor mode and injection before buying.

Intel adapters will not work. The iwlwifi driver supports monitor mode but not injection. The app detects this and tells you, rather than failing quietly. Monitor mode alone is not enough.

Verify yours:

modules/01_iface.sh --caps-tsv

That reports what your driver actually supports, rather than what the marketing page claimed.

Second Wi-Fi adapter — for client isolation

Client Isolation needs two interfaces associated at the same time — one as the victim, one as the attacker. Any managed-capable card works as the second; it doesn't need to inject.

Bluetooth adapter — for eight modules

Bluetooth Recon, Bluetooth Attack, BLE Mesh, Tracker Hunt, Classic SSP, Adv Forge, BLE Fuzzing, HID Injection.

A recent adapter is preferable. Some older CSR dongles won't pass BLE advertising data through, which silently limits what you'll see.

802.15.4 radio — for Zigbee and Thread

A CC2531, CC2652 or nRF52840 dongle, flashed with sniffing firmware.

One radio covers both: Thread and Zigbee share the same physical layer and differ only in the stack above it. This is also the hardware that gets you toward Matter.

SDR — for RF work

RF Spectrum, Sub-GHz, LoRa/LoRaWAN and Drone Remote ID.

• RTL-SDR — cheap entry point, receive-only, covers sub-GHz
• HackRF — adds 2.4 GHz and transmit

Sub-GHz transmission — replay attacks and similar — needs TX-capable hardware. An RTL-SDR can only listen, and the module will say so rather than appearing to work.

What works with no hardware at all

• The whole interface, all 58 module pages
• Reading and analysing captures you already have
• Offline PMKID cracking
• Wordlist management
• Parsing a dumped router flash image
• Every --selftest

Checking what you have

sudo bash wifisting.sh          # the CLI lists modules and their state
modules/01_iface.sh --list-tsv  # interfaces
modules/01_iface.sh --caps-tsv  # what the driver supports

If a module reports hardware missing that you believe you have, that's worth reporting — the detection is meant to be accurate, not conservative.