Finding Wi-Fi devices

The process of joining a Wi-Fi network is simple. The devices can listen for other devices to identity them. These identifiers are broadcast continuously and are known as beacons. These types of unique beacons are broadcast by the devices, which act as access points. These beacons include an SSID that acts as the name of that access point. Every SSID broadcasts its own unique beacon frame to notify any listening device that this SSID is available and it has particular capabilities. We can sniff the packets in the Wi-Fi interface to get the Wi-Fi devices available in the area by listening to these beacons broadcast by the access points. Here we use Scapy to analyze the packets captured by the interface to extract the beacons.