Inside the Black Hat Wi-Fi control room

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It never ceases to amaze me how so much can be done with so little. Case in point is the Aruba Networks provided Wi-Fi network at the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

I’ve got a more detailed story already published on the setup of the network (so be sure to check that out too), but actually seeing the control room adds another dimension.

The control center for the Black Hat Wi-Fi network was actually just a small corner of one desk in one room.  The whole environment was managed and monitored by a cloud based service that Aruba Networks provided. To make it even sweeter, they actually used an iPhone app to do some of the monitoring too.

It’s what the cloud and mobile apps are all about – more power with less gear and total mobility. Let’s not forget the role of Linux here either, Aruba’s gear uses Linux as its underlying operating system. In the control room the two notebooks that Aruba was using were also running Linux (Fedora and CentOS).

So here you go, an inside look at what the control room at Black Hat’s Wi-Fi network actually looked like.