So what I did was enabling a bandwidth limitation of 1Mbps for the Kindle on my router. It was -51db, so I figured it must be another room. The next day I stayed at home waiting for the device to connect, and the above apps sent a notification when it did at 9:55, but I could only read the strength once without having time to move the router before the Kindle went offline. I tested the method with my wife’s Kindle, strength was about -50db from another room, never below -40db in the same room and went up to -30 db close to the router. My router prints the signal strength of the connected devices, so I connected long LAN and power cables to the router, planning to hunt down my Kindle. By checking this page time to time I learned that books were downloaded between 9AM-10AM.
In you can also check what books/docs are downloaded to your Kindle, so I sent some large books to the Kindle email-address.
They also recognized Amazon as the manufacturer of my wife’s Kindle, helping me to match to the MAC address shown on the router's interface.
My router has no log about devices connecting and leaving, so I installed Android apps Fing and Easy WiFi Alert, both are capable of sending notifications when a device connects to your LAN. So you gave me the idea that the Kindle updates its contents once a day so must connect to WiFi.
Let me share my solution here, especially as the ideas from this post helped me a lot. A quick and dirty way of doing so is positioning the receivers at the same position from a constant power emitter (wifi router, for example) and using the signal strength value difference between them as a calibration factor to be subtracted it from the signals received afterwards. This simplified location approach is only possible if the emitter is located in between the receivers, that is, a three-set of receivers (2D) form a triangle that has the emitter inside it.ĭifferent receivers might have different antenna gains and correcting for it will greatly increase accuracy. The margin of error was about 1m/3ft even with several concrete/brick walls in between the receivers and the emission. The lines should cross at the source of the emission - the Kindle was at a closet in this case. To triangulate the signal (for a 2D location), draw a chart with the position of the laptop wifi receivers and for every pair of receivers, draw a line perpendicular to the line going through the points in a point inversely proportional to the square root of the mW power values, as the signal drops of proportionally to the square of the distance (for 3D use at least 4 receivers and a surface between the points). Then convert the values from dbm to mW using the following formula: mW=10^(dBm/10)*1000. There are in fact 4 allthedata files with different extensions per capture, and on the xml you can find the manufacturer of the device in the logs, so even if you don't know the mac address by looking up an Amazon branded device connected to your router you may find the Kindle entry.Īt the Kindle entry, find the signal strength value and note it for all the receiver computers.
I started the pcs before going to sleep and as I woke up a bit past the usual update time, I hit ctrl-C to stop the capture and looked up the device on the allthedata.csv files by its MAC number which can be obtained at the router logs. Replace the square brackets by the channel number: airodump-ng -c -w allthedata wlan0mon
Run the following line to run airodump again only at the specified channel and record the data to the "allthedata.csv" file in the terminal directory (usually the root for a live cd/usb if you didn't change it). Then run airodump to find your wifi network and its channel: airodump-ng wlan0monĮnter Ctrl-C to end the capture once you note the desired network's channel Check the wifi interface name on iwconfig and modify accordingly if the next line returns a related error. To start monitor mode on a wifi card (in this case wlan0, check on iwconfig if needed): airmon-ng start wlan0Īirmon usually changes the card name to wlanmon after this.
Three lines of code in the terminal in at least three Kali Linux running devices (2D location, at least 4 receivers out of plane for 3D): The following procedure can be used to physically find any active wifi device connected to a network:
So I set up the delivery of a biggish pdf file through the kindle email so I'd ensure a long enough connection, end set up three laptops with a Kali Linux running live with airodump sniffing packages (modified from here: ) I discovered that the Kindle updates its contents daily while in deep sleep around 5:30-6:30AM. However I'd still like to know if there's a way to find it that's less overkill. Adding as a community wiki Answer and removing the solution edits from the Question.įound the Kindle using the sniffing technique described below.