how to capture wlan packets

Question

I have a program on my iPad that makes a direct TCP connection (bypassing the HTTP proxy settings in the Settings menu). I have been tasked to debug this, but I've been unable to find a way to capture the data stream (and the guy who compiles the program is not very responsive).

So... I've been trying to set my wlan to "no encryption at all", booting up Kali, putting the wlan interface into monitoring mode (airmon-ng start wlan0). Then started Wireshark & tried sniffing on both mon0 & wlan0. Neither did really result into anything useful.

That's what I did till now, but I'm out of ideas.

Does anyone know what way I can do it? (preferably even using Windows?)

What I want to get in the end is a pcap file (so I can look at it in Wireshark) of the data traffic. I'm not interested in the packets per se, but in the raw data transfer of the application.

Thanks!

Answer 1

What I finally did: I own an Android telephone which could be rooted (and installed "Shark for Root"). So, I enabled a hotspot, connected my iPad to it, and dumped the traffic that way. Weird thing though is that I had to reboot my device to be able to download the pcap file to my computer. It could be read on the device by SharkReader though without reboot. bitShark is another option, and looks much more nice, but I prefer the simpler interface of Shark for Root.

Answer 2

Use another Laptop (Windows or Linux, your choice) with WLAN card in Promiscuous mode, which will sit besides your iPad and capture all the packets on air.

Check this for more details.