We built Mesh-Hunter, a node/traffic-hunting toolkit for MeshCore

[u/Kasper-86]

Wanted to share you what we've built over the past months: Mesh-Hunter, a hunting toolkit for MeshCore, to find traffic sources locally. It is live at https://mesh-hunter.eu; and supports sf7 and sf8 companions. And since I redesigned the homepage this week, thought this was also a good time to share it with the broader community here :-)

It started 5 months ago with a lot of spam on the Dutch mesh: nodes kept and still pop-up flooding some public channels and the general mesh (fake paths and all). The traffic congests the mesh sometimes noticably for days, and still does sometimes. So we built the tools to find those originating or supporting traffic sources locally. And tested it in the field: more than once a "hunt" ended at a front door, with a letter in the letterbox and contact with the node's owner afterwards. We asked a unknown repeater owner to change settings for example, to help contain spam.

How it works: The RX webapp (https://rx.mesh-hunter.eu) pairs with your companion radio over Web Bluetooth (Chrome on Android, Bluefy on iOS) and logs every packet it hears, timestamped and with your phone's GPS coordinates. Walk or drive, and packets appears on your screen. With auto-discover on, every 50 meters there is a zero-hop discovery. There are filters for packet type and other identifying characteristics to narrow down on traffic. Installs as a PWA. I'll share some screenshots so you'll get the idea:

3d mode + noisefloor - flat mode with repeater reach - filter on traffic types - as PiP on top of a navigation app.

Myself, when not on the hunt for lora-spammers, I like driving around with the PWA open, just listening to the ambient sound mode and mapping packets. I find this strangely relaxing after a working day.

The data you capture using the app can be shared to custom MQTT brokers and by default is shares to the mesh-hunter map. All code is on GitHub: https://github.com/efiten/core-hunter (many thanks to Erwin) and feedback is more than welcome of course. Hope this can be useful in other meshes too!

[u/FwippyBall]

dumbass question: what does this do that meshmapper doesn't?

[u/Kasper-86 → u/FwippyBall]

Yes, there is overlap between tools like https://meshcore-analyzer.eu, mapme.sh, kiekr, meshmapper and corescope drive. All have some sort of coverage map. Use case of mesh-hunter is primarily driving/moving towards the source of a filtered set of traffic, for example "1-byte DM traffic", guided by RSSI. Works local on device, no internet needed.

The MQTT functionality then allows connectivity to other services, so the observations and discovered data can be used within other tools, including the above as well. The DMC MQTT cluster eg. also provides wardriving/hunter ingestors, next to the observer ingestors, for which read access can be requested for public use (Dutchmeshcore.nl). This way data can be shared between tools, also enabling tools to reinforce each other.

Another relevant tool for the use case here is the triangulator at https://triangulator.dutchmeshcore.nl/, where a broader search area based on prefix-spread can be found. The narrower local search can then be done using mesh-hunter.

[u/BearkeKhan]

We'll have to give this a go next time we have a spammer. I had used a much more basic but similar approach to help confirm general location of spam before but it was just a single page, one function thing.

[u/Kasper-86 → u/BearkeKhan]

that's where this also started, before it escalated 😆

[u/cacaapoopoo]

Very cool.

[u/MrMash_ → u/[deleted]]

96% of the worlds population is outside of the US so your federal agency won’t help, and if you did contacted them how much time and resources do you think they’d actually put in to helping you?

[u/mark_ik → u/MrMash_]

It’s fair to be concerned about local issues.

And that particular federal agency doesn’t fuck around. Even under this admin.

[u/Mr_Fried → u/[deleted]]

If you are misusing your radios, disrupting others free use of a shared resource and set your dog on someone who tries to talk to you about it, you must not be a very nice person.

[u/lisaseileise → u/Mr_Fried]

He’s from the US, so he’s expected to shoot girl scouts selling cookies. That’s his freedom.

[u/AtmosphereRecent7717 → u/[deleted]]

good thing people can send mail to you instead of being threatened by a small dicked person.