A WiFi router in a smartphone charger? Beware of network attacks

Hackaday colleagues recently reported that prolific maker Ryan Walker published a new project in Medium that involves building a fully functional Wi-Fi router inside the outer casing of a smartphone charger. This time, given the size, a Raspberry Pi model was not used, but an alternative Single Board Computer was chosen.

Credit: Ryan Walker The project, which Walker describes as a "Pineapple" (a router designed for network attacks and exploits to enter the target's network for password sniffing, man-in-the-middle attacks and more), it was designed to look absolutely completely harmless, being inserted housed inside a typical cell phone charger case. At the heart of it all is an Allwinner A33 chip (a quad-core processor used in budget Android tablets), accompanied by 1GB of DDR3 RAM and an SD card for storage, running Linux.

The device, from the initial CAD files to the final firmware, was designed to be completely open-source, hence the Bill Of Materials (BoM) rather simple and which has components that are easily available on the market. The initial prototype uses USB Wi-Fi adapters, but the plan is to use a dedicated chip for seamless integration into the device.

Credit: Ryan Walker Aside from its potential security implications, this project shows what can be built with a little commitment and inventiveness. It will be interesting to read the second part of the explanations on Walker's blog, where he promised to explain the assembly process in more detail.

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