Just before I started NS, I did a 1-month long internship at DSTA, where I explored the capabilities of a wireless network pentesting tool, the WiFi Pineapple. I wasn’t able to do anything novel with it apart from what the built-in modules could achieve, but I did set up a system to passively capture WPA2 packets and upload them to a server to brute-force a PSK. With some help, it managed to obtain the PSK of the off-band network my supervisors were using.

I also helped my mentors out with a physical attack demo, using a Raspberry Pi masquerading as a USB input/storage composite device to install a payload .apk “on behalf” of the user.

While nothing novel, it was a fun experience and an interesting dive into wireless networking and physical device attacks.