The HotSpoot is a device meant to be on stage during privacy related conference for educational purpose. It offers a Wifi access point. At the beginning of the conference, just ask the attendees to connect to your HotSpoot. During the conference, people will naturally use their smartphones to browse the Web, use Facebook or Twitter, or others. The HotSpoot will observe the network traffic and the light will change of color according to the website which is visited.

The HotSpoot is meant to:

provide an Internet connection
to observe the routed traffic

While observing the network traffic, it collects these statistics:

list of DNS resolvers
list of DNS queries
list of visited websites

At the end of the conference, explain what the HotSpoot is and show the statistics to the attendees.

You can clone the HotSpoot git repository.

Hardware

The HotSpoot uses:

1 x Adafruit NeoPixel
1 x Scanlime FadeCandy
1 x Raspberry Pi 2
1 x Ubiquiti AP AC Lite
2 x Anker USB Ethernet adapter
2 x 40mm 5V fans
various 3D printed parts (ask for files if not published yet)
1 x plastic cauldron

The total price is around 250€.

Software

The HotSpoot itself is based on:

Raspbian as Raspberry Pi OS
FadeCandy server and library to control the NeoPixel in Python
pyshark to observe the network traffic
isc-dhcp-server as DHCP server
iptables as firewall

The HotSpoot companion is a Docker container running on a separate computer based on:

statsd for statistics collection
graphite for data storage and graphing

Statistics collection

In order to draw nice plots from the raw statistics, the HotSpoot sends information to another machine running statsd and graphite. It is also possible to use grafana with this grafana graphite Docker image.

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