Warflying in a Cessna, Part II
Matthew Thomassen, Sean McKeever
RF Village @ DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · RF Village
In "Warflying in a Cessna, Part II: Upping Our Game," Matthew Thomassen, a security architect and commercial pilot, alongside his colleague Sean McKeever, a cybersecurity researcher and architect, presented an update on their ongoing project to map wireless access points from a small aircraft. This talk, delivered at RF Village, builds upon their initial presentation at DEF CON, delving deeper into the methodologies, equipment, and lessons learned from their aerial Wi-Fi reconnaissance efforts. The project aims to explore the capabilities and limitations of collecting Wi-Fi data from an elevated perspective, specifically around 1500 feet above ground level, a unique vantage point that minimizes ground-level obstructions prevalent in traditional war driving.
AI review
Genuinely fun niche research with a clear methodology and some real findings — the fuselage blocking confirmation, the 5GHz prevalence discovery, and the warflying-vs-wardriving trade-off quantification are all legitimately useful. But this is RF Village-tier content, not main stage material: the findings are incremental, the threat model is thin, and the mysterious 00D97 MAC addresses being left unresolved is the most interesting hook they declined to pull.