How aircrack-ng captures packets? Is it use wire shark at back end?

Question

I am using aircrack-ng for packet capturing. I want to see the packet size and packet detail of every client aircrack-ng is sniffing. How it is possible using aircrack-ng? Is there any code inside airodump-ng which gives me that detail?

Answer 1

As for your title question

"How aircrack-ng captures packets? Is it use wire shark at back end?"

aircrack-ng uses the libpcap library for packet capture and basic filtering, as does wireshark (via its dumpcap child process) and tcpdump.

You can see the numerous calls to pcap via the source code here:

http://trac.aircrack-ng.org/wiki/Sources

http://trac.aircrack-ng.org/browser#trunk/src

$ svn co http://svn.aircrack-ng.org/trunk aircrack-ng
$ cd aircrack-ng/
$ grep -nr pcap ./* | wc -l
398

398 references, all over the place.

$ grep -r --files-with-matches pcap ./* | grep "src/.*\.[ch]"
./src/besside-ng.c
./src/include/ethernet.h
./src/airdecloak-ng.h
./src/besside-ng-crawler.c
./src/packetforge-ng.c
./src/tkiptun-ng.c
./src/wpaclean.c
./src/pcap.h
./src/airdecap-ng.c
./src/airodump-ng.c
./src/airodump-ng.h
./src/airdecloak-ng.c
./src/aircrack-ptw-lib.c
./src/airtun-ng.c
./src/aircrack-ng.c
./src/wesside-ng.c
./src/makeivs-ng.c
./src/aireplay-ng.c
./src/osdep/file.c
./src/osdep/airpcap.h
./src/osdep/osdep.h
./src/osdep/airpcap.c
./src/osdep/cygwin.c
./src/osdep/linux.c
./src/airbase-ng.c
./src/ivstools.c

For more info on libpcap:

http://www.tcpdump.org/