OmniPeek Personal takes on Wireshark

Wireless Working

WLAN support is well implemented, if limited in some areas. An SSID tree view provides a hierarchical structure of the relationship between ESSIDs/BSSIDs and respective stations, while application layer analysis is enabled courtesy of OmniPeek Personal decoding and decrypting encrypted packets with user defined WEP or WPA keys.

While supporting TKIP decryption, OmniPeek Personal does not however support either AES or WPA2 decryption. Nor is there any visibility of control and management traffic, or RF Monitoring capability for channel scanning or hopping. It also requires the installation of a special NDIS driver for a supported network driver in order to capture wireless packets. An Atheros WLAN adapter driver is included which supports WPA/PSK decryption, noise management and hardware timestamping with microsecond accuracy.

A hierarchical tree view of an 802.11 WLAN is OK, but OmniPeek Personal is actually rather limited when it comes to WLAN support and analysis functionality

Conclusion

Ease of use and communication of complex information do not usually go hand in hand, OmniPeek Personal ensures they do with the help of intuitive graphing aids and detailed network statistics

By escaping the capture-wait-watch mantra and introducing a highly visual and intuitive interface, OmniPeek Personal is worthy of serious consideration provided you meet the very inflexible OS requirement.