Debdroid: Run a Network Sniffing Debian System on Android!

Just recently, it was announced that the Android phone operating system has grown a lot in the last two years. This we know from a fact by looking at the numerous Android powered phones in the market now. With increase in usage, you will also find an increase in tools that help you with ‘breakage’ . Examples of those are – Android LOIC (we haven’t covered this yet!), Nmap 5.50 for Android and Droidmap. Now, we have – Debdroid.

Debroid helps you run a Debian system with a lot of utilities that help you sniff packets. In addition to various other tools and libraries, it contains tools such as:

- openssh
- libpcap
- libpcap-dev
- ettercap
- wireshark
- carwhisperer
- btscan
- NMAP
- ntbscan
These come pre-installed with the Debian image. To install, simply download the image from the links provided and follow these steps:

Unzip the .zip and .7z files and copy all the contents to /sdcard/debian/
Run your preferred terminal emulator and run bash with su.
Install debroid with – sh ./sdcard/debian/debian.sh
Boot into debian with the following command – debroid and voila!

You will be presented with a similar screen:



Now to the juice of this Debian. This is one of the reasons, we like this a lot – Run Ettercap in a promiscuous mode:

ifconfig eth0 promisc
cd /root/tools/
./etrun
That’s all! You can now sniff the WLAN traffic with un-encrypted credentials and use the capture file later with something like Wireshark. The author plans on adding GUIs for tools such as NMAP, etc. It does not require a lot of dependencies either. It just requires the following:

Root access
Busybox
Kernel that supports loopback devices and ext2 (Tested on various Cyanogen Mod nightly builds, HTC EVO to be precise)