I will be writing a guide on how to crack wireless 802.11 network securities in order to recover a lost or forgotten wireless key. This guide is to be used only on your own network and is not being written to attack someone else’s network. This guide could effectively be used to recover a lost password for your wireless network if you have forgotten it or lost that piece of paper you probably wrote it on, which is a horrible idea in the first place. I am currently a TA for a wireless infrastructure class and am also currently studying wireless securities.
Two audiences for these types of instructions may be security professionals who are studying the insecurities of wireless networks, and the actual end users of wireless products. Many security professionals will be familiar with why wireless networks are insecure and understand the inherent insecurities they will be dealing with. They will also be familiar with the different software that will be utilized in cracking wireless networks. This knowledge will make it much easier to guide these users through this complex process. These users will want concise points of what to do and probably not necessarily why because they already understand why they’re doing each step with their inherent knowledge of 802.11 securities. They will be more concerned with the exact commands being utilized rather than where to go to find the software and such. The end user audience, that being most average consumers, probably know very little about how wireless security works and even that its actually very insecure. They will probably also be very unfamiliar with the software that will be utilized and will need a much more in depth explanation of the process. These users will want detailed explanations of where to find the tools, the information used in the cracking process, and what each step is actually doing. They are more concerned with easily finding things and quickly.
For this process I will utilize many screen shots to make the instructions more enriched and useful. These will help the user visualize each step and how the commands they will be using look once entered in. Also I will take advantage of figures and tables to better organize the different parameters that are used in the commands. This will make things easier to follow. I will utilize a step by step structure since the steps are chronological and rely on one step being completed before moving to the next.
Instructor Feedback: Matt
I think you are moving in the right direction, Matt. As Jeremy and I have been telling the class, it is vitally important to your project's success that you produce two clearly distinct instruction sets. The general worry with this project is that the difference between the two sets will be one of degree (that is, the expert set will simply be a truncated version of the novice set); we are expecting a difference in kind (the expert set should be qualitatively different from the novice set). What you have proposed here potentially runs the risk of falling into this trap. However, paying extra attention to your audiences as you have defined them here should help produce unique enough instruction sets.
In discussing your audiences, you draw out two different perspectives: those who would set-up/test such a procedure and those who would use it. As you work on your instructions continue to differentiate the two sets in this way. The end-user doesn't simply need more information; they need different information. That is, it should be clear from the instructions that they have been purpose built to meet the competing needs, values, and expectations of the two audiences you have described here.
Additionally, I think you have a good handle on the contexts of use for these instructions. In particular, when you write that the "two audiences for these types of instructions may be security professionals who are studying the insecurities of wireless networks, and the actual end users of wireless products," you demonstrate that each audience will use the information in a different way and in a different place. Again, remember the different needs and expectations of your two audiences as well as their contexts of use.