Why CWAP? CWAP is one of the professional exams required to qualify for the title to be CWNP (Certified Wireless Network Professional). This blogpost will particularly focus on the CWAP-403 exam released in late 2018. From my personal experience and many in the wi-fi community have regarded it as the hardest of the professional level certification exams. It is also […]
This blog post will focus on certain aspects of Wireshark frames which can be brought to use for analyzing and troubleshooting Wi-Fi issues. I recommend downloading metageek color filters and apply it to your Wireshark for filtering specific frame types with applied colorization. You can read more about applying the color filters here. SSID/BSSID information. In Pcaps they can be […]
CWAP-403 covers this topic under the 802.11 Frame Exchanges section. I’ve found this topic a bit hard to grasp. I have attempted to read the CWAP-403 study guide but honestly I could not get closer to fully grasp the topic. Much of the explanation in that book is direct copy/paste from standards documents. There is not much of attempt made […]
Exam Specific only as I’ve outlined another post on this topic here 1. Spectrum Analysis – 15% 1.1 Capture RF spectrum data and understand the common views available in spectrum analyzers1.1.1 Install, configure and use spectrum analysis software and hardware Configure Wi-Fi integration Save and export capture data1.1.2 Capture RF spectrum data using handheld, laptop-based and infrastructure spectrum capture solutions1.1.3 […]
Contention Algorithms The client STA must locate an AP to which it desires to connect which it does either actively or passively. The 802.11 MAC layer provides the following functions. Scanning – Process used to discover BSS or to discover access points within a known BSS. It can either be done passively (Beacon frames) or actively (Probe Request/Response frames). Synchronisation […]
This blog post features the chapter 5 from CWAP-403 book. I have tried to summarize it as I’ve read through the book. Hope this helps you in the journey to become CWAP-403 certified. I am still waiting to give my 2nd attempt hopefully be able to give once the COVID19 lock down is relaxed. I am aiming to revise the […]
Spectrum Analyzer – comprises of 15% syllabus for CWAP-403 exam. You can roughly expect around 9 questions from this section. Spectrum Analyzers range in price from a few hundred $ to thousands. They are not free to use like in the case of Wireshark etc.. I was unable to source spectrum analyzers easily and ended up not reading thoroughly on […]
I’ve tried to condense my notes from the study for CWAP-403 exam. The exam consists of lot of details which need to be learnt if you have not done enough capturing and analyzing 802.11 wireless frames before. CWAP 403 – Start > Introductory blog 802.11 Mac Header explained Key 802.11 Frames Troubleshooting WLAN issues #mindmap PHY Layer WLAN medium contention […]
This blog post will be focusing on 802.11ac in particular. We visited the aspects of 802.11n in the last blog post. 802.11ac introduced the VHT (Very High Throughput) along with some core technological advancement like MU-MIMO, 256 QAM addition & support for 80MHz/160MHz channels. One of the key differences also lie in the support of only 5GHz band. So there […]
