Raspberry Pi 3 wifi cancellation

Question

Is it possible to completely disable the WiFi on the Raspberry Pi 3? Meaning no wireless connection at all for eternity?

I think the best way is just to physically cut off the antenna from the board itself, but will it damage the Raspberry?

@tlhIngan it's not a duplicate, because the question is different: not just disable, but make it "unable to being used/elaborated/detected" — Alexey Vesnin, Jul 02 '16 at 12:57

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 03 '16 at 21:03

2

In raspbian do:

aptitude purge firmware-brcm80211

This way the wireless firmware wont be loaded at boot time. In addition, it will save RAM too.

answered Jul 03 '16 at 21:03

Rui F Ribeiro

211
2
9

Good answer although you could "save RAM" on about the same scale by shortening your hostname ;) – goldilocks Jul 08 '16 at 15:51

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 02 '16 at 01:17

1

No transmitter will "like" an antenna being just cut off - it will fry for sure. Disable the built-in WiFi hardware in your OS, or - if it's a privacy concern - in your OS image disable the specific device support by VendorID/DeviceID pair, so there will be no way to detect it. If you need even more security+privacy - play with dtb-lists to prevent even an externally-built module to detect the WiFi chip and use a kernel modules signature check. But don't cut off the antenna - it's not the way it's done properly

answered Jul 02 '16 at 01:17

Alexey Vesnin

926
9
16

will it disable all wave emission? I'd like to be sure there is no wave emission? – Philippe Gachoud Sep 13 '16 at 05:43
1

@PhilippeGachoud As far as I concern there's no WiFi chip that is emitting/active "by default", i.e. not being activated by direct-query/bios/driver/software first – Alexey Vesnin Sep 13 '16 at 11:01

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 02 '16 at 20:28

1

Have a look at the rfkill program to disable wlan and bluetooth on the software level. I think some chips will turn off completely, others just stop transmitting anything.

answered Jul 02 '16 at 20:28

allo

330
3
13

score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 03 '16 at 16:02

I think that any kind of software has a backdoor, e.g. a creator of a software knows how to bypass it, or professional hackers learn how to attack "disabled" WiFi and Bluetooth computers

Therefore there's no way of 100% protect the Raspberry Pi 3, and I don't think there will be any future Raspberry Pi without wireless connectivity

Raspberry Pi 3 wifi cancellation

4 Answers4