Introduction

In the past when perfoming a wifi audit it was common to know that the alfa was a must to have usb device, but at that time all wifi were 2.4Ghz. Today most of the Access points are dual band and sometimes we need to see the 5ghz during a pentest or security monitoring.

Right now the best chip that has monitor mode and allows to inject packes is the RTL8812AU, which of course alfa has a dual band model.

The TP-Link Archer T4UHP AC1300 Box

Specifications

Uses the RTL8812AU chipset which allows to have dual band.

This usb wifi dongle has high power which competes head to head with the Alfa AWUS036ACH.

The usb device is very nice and comes with two antennas with sma connectors.

TP-link Archer T4UHP view

The bad thing we notice after opening the package is that you can't use most of the antennas, since the RP-SMA is too deep and it makes impossible to fit it. You can use a sma connector extension which of course will fit inside the hole, buy you will to buy it or build it by yourself.

Archer T4UHP antenna connector problem

The device supports the follow IEEE standards:

IEEE 802.11ac
IEEE 802.11a
IEEE 802.11n
IEEE 802.11g
IEEE 802.12b

Compatibility

We tried to use the wifi device with Kali and it was added support on Kali 2017.1, the device worked out of the box including packet injection. If you are using Ubuntu you can try to compile drivers manually:

git clone -b v4.3.21 https://github.com/astsam/rtl8812au.git
cd rtl8812au
make RTL8811=1 DEBUG=1
sudo make install

We also tried with Raspbian 8 (jessie) and we have to manually compile the drivers.

To install the TP-link Archer T4UHP on a raspberrypi try the following commands:

sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notro/rpi-source/master/rpi-source -O /usr/bin/rpi-source && sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-source && /usr/bin/rpi-source -q --tag-update
sudo apt-get install bc
rpi-source
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/abperiasamy/rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux.git
cd rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux
make -f Makefile.dkms install

Reboot.

If you have an error about a missign a armv6 or v7, try to create the symbolic link:

cd /home/pi/linux-be2540e540f5442d7b372208787fb64100af0c54/arch
sudo ln -s arm armv6l

Conclusion

We got the usb device at very good price and we are pretty happy with it. If you are planning to use the default antennas or use a bug antenna the RP-SMA connector will not be an issue. If you find the this usb device at the same price as the alfa, you should go to the alfa. We bought it with a great discount. The device has a great look also.