HackRF One

Introduction

When the HackRF One launched in 2014, it completely redefined the pentest/hacker community: an completely affordable, hugely capable, open-source device that allowed anyone to receive, decode, modify, replay and transmit any signal from 1MHz to 6GHz.

The HackRF One's hardware is often refreshed. Lab401 stocks the latest version: Revision 10.

Before the existence of the HackRF, RF research and manipulation was restricted to RF wizards with arcane hardware skills, or government/industrial facilities with unlimited budgets. Justly; the HackRF One was funded by DARPA.

Software Defined Radio ushered in a new era: where raw processing power could perform tasks previously restricted to hardware, and thus allowing anyone with a computer and a modest budget to dissect RF.

Since its initial release, there are dozens of highly specialised SDR tools, but the HackRF One remains the staple tool for hackers, pentesters and RF enthusiasts - due to its simplicity, cost and wealth of tutorial information available.

The HackRF One requires an external computer to control it, or the PortaPack device, which allows untethered use of the HackRF, with massive built-in functionality.

Overview

The HackRF is a half-duplex transceiver operating between 1MHz - 6HGz with up to 20MHz of bandwidth.

It is compatible with all major SDR suites across multiple platforms: GNU Radio, SDR#, SDR_Radio, Universal Radio Hacker, QSpectrumAnalyzer.

There are extensive tutorials and toolkits available for working with the HackRF One.

The versatility of the HackRF One render it useful across multiple disciplines and tasks:

• Remote Control Analysis: Analyse, replay and emulate car remotes, alarms, garage remotes, etc.
• GPS Manipulation: Block, manipulate or adjust GPS signals for location-aware devices
• GSM research: IMSI capture and analysis.
  
• Bluetooth sniffing: Sniff, capture and analyse Bluetooth and BLE traffic.
• Advanced RFID Analysis: Analyse and communicate with all RFID tags, regardless of their frequency.
• Standard SDR functionality: ADB-S Tracking, satellite-communication, packet-sniffing, signal analysis, etc