There is plenty of information online about wireless security. Sorting through it all can be overwhelming. The purpose of this piece is to provide clarification, and then apply our lab's collection of hardware to the task of testing wireless security's strength. We start by breaking WEP and end with distributed WPA cracking in the cloud. By the end, you'll have a much better idea of how secure your Wi-Fi network really is.
Wireless attacks: Public WiFi, free WiFi, and personal hotspots on the go have increased the wireless playgrounds that the attackers can target. Attackers can hack into the network and can monitor the traffic in that network or crack the password and use your network for free. Just check the wireless networks that the laptop catches and you can see an example right there!
Best Gpu For Wpa Cracking Free
WPA/WPA2 cracking technique: Our devices have wireless passwords stored so that we do not enter the password on the same device again and again. The attackers take advantage of this by forcefully de-authenticating all the devices on the network. The devices will try to auto-connect to the access point by completing the 4-way handshake. This handshake is recorded and has the hashed password. The hashed password can be brute-forced by using a rainbow table.
WPS cracking: This technology uses an 8 digit pin to connect to the wireless router. Brute forcing the 8 digit pin will give access to the router. Various tools use various optimization techniques to increase the speed of this attack and crack the key in a couple of hours.
Wireless hacking tools are the software programs specifically designed to hack wireless networks by either leveraging dictionary attacks for cracking WEP/WPA protected wireless networks or exploiting susceptibilities in wifi systems.
We have compiled a list of the best wifi password hacking or recovery tools that can be used for educational purposes and to hack your own systems or wifi networks. If you are looking to become a cybersecurity professional, you would have to understand wifi hacking and learn about wireless technologies.
Aircrack-ng is one of the most popular suites of tools that can be used to monitor, attack, test, and crack WiFi networks. It is compatible with Windows, Linux, OS X and is a command-line tool. It can be used for attacking and cracking WPA and WEP. The attaching mechanism is simple. It monitors and collects packets, once enough packets are captured; it tries to recover the password.
AirSnort is free WiFi hacking software that captures the packets and tries to decrypt the keys. The monitoring is done in promiscuous mode and records enough packets to reliably decrypt the key. It is a simple tool and supports both Windows and Linux platforms. Further development and maintenance of this tool has been discontinued but the older version can still be downloaded.
Kismet is free software written in C++ that can be used to sniff TCP, UDP, DHCP, and ARP packets. It is a passive tool and does not interact with the network. It has the ability to find hidden networks and is used in wardriving kind of activities. The captured packets can be exported to WireShark and can be further analyzed. It is available for Linux, Windows, and a few other platforms.
Cain & Abel is one of the most popular tools that is used for password cracking. The tool is able to sniff the network, crack encrypted passwords using various password cracking techniques, and perform cryptanalysis attacks. It can also discover wireless keys by analyzing wireless protocols.
SSID mentioned in capital letters in the name itself suggests the features of this tool. It is a wireless scanner tool which supports both Windows and OS X. The tool was available as an open-source software but not any longer. The tool is able to get information from wireless cards and helps you to choose the best channel available with maximum strength. The signal strength is available in graphical format plotted along time. Various versions of the tool are available and you can choose as per your requirement (you would need to hunt it though).
Reaver uses brute force techniques against WiFi protected setup registrar PINs to get WPA/WPA2 passphrases. One of the best things about this tool is the response time. You can get the passphrase in plaintext within just a couple of hours. If you are using kali, the reaver package is pre-bundled.
Fern WiFi Cracker is a python based tool that can be used for WEP/WPA/WPA2 cracking, session hijacking, ARP request replays, and performing brute force attacks. It is able to save the key in the database on a successful attack. It supports an automatic access point attacking feature and has an internal MITM engine as well. This too is also pre-bundled in kali.
Cloudcracker is a cloud-based solution for cracking the passwords of various utilities. The tool uses dictionary-based attacks to crack the passwords. The size of the dictionary ranges up to 10 digits. Just upload the handshake file along with a few other details and you are all set.
KisMac is a wireless network discovery hacking tool specifically for Mac OS X. This classic 802.11 WEP/WPA cracking tool is not for beginners, rather, quite popular among advanced professionals. It tries to crack WEP and WPA keys by scanning for networks passively on supported WiFi cards by any flaw or leveraging any flaw or using brute force.
NMAP is one of the best hacking tools because it is quite versatile, usable, and is loaded with a variety of features for making security scanning seamless. Initially, NMAP was only compatible with Linux but gradually it started functioning on other operating systems such as Windows, IRIX, Solaris, AmigaOS, BSD variants (including OS X), HP-UX, etc.
IKECrack is an open-source wireless hacking tool for cracking IPsec/IKE authentication. This tool is specially built to capture Internet Key Exchange packets. Also, it's an effective tool for VPN network cracking. IKECrack hacks into a wireless network by obtaining and using the identity and secret key combinations of the network.
There are many wireless hacking tools available in the market, 15 of which we have discussed in this article. It is to be noted that the tools are discussed in random order and not in any form of priority or superiority over the other. The tools discussed here are not only designed for wireless hackers but are also used by WiFi admins and programmers working on WiFi-based projects alike. These tools can either be used for monitoring the network or cracking the keys to getting access. You may need to use multiple tools to get the desired output as none of the tools would fulfil all the requirements. As a wireless hacker or security professional, you should have some of these tools in your arsenal readily available for quick analysis. Some of the tools perform brute force to crack the keys, make sure that you have an updated master key dump or make a customized list from your experience. A WiFi hacker will always have a customized list prepared by collecting various lists. The hacking program will only be as good as the wordlist itself.
Pyrit is one of the most powerful WPA/WPA2 cracking tools in a hacker's arsenal, with the ability to benchmark a computer's CPU speeds, analyze capture files for crackable handshakes, and even tap into GPU password-cracking power. To demonstrate how quickly it can hack a WPA/WPA2 password, we'll use it to play a Wi-Fi hacking CTF game anyone can practice for less than $10.
While we won't be using GPU cracking today, Pyrit is capable of using a compatible GPU to crack passwords even faster. It's dependent on your computer's hardware, and thus the setup process will depend on the type of GPU you have and whether you choose to use OpenCL or CUDA. Once GPU acceleration is enabled, Pyrit is one of the fastest tools available for WPA password-cracking out there.
Pyrit has many tools that are useful for hackers and pentesters besides just cracking passwords, and today, we'll use a few of those tools to help us play a capture-the-flag Wi-Fi hacking game. One helpful tool is the strip command, which strips down long capture files to only include relevant packets. And then there's the verify option that lets Pyrit confirm results via recomputation.
Pyrit also has several features to import multiple password lists into a large database. To prevent duplicates, the import_unique_passwords command can also strip out passwords that appear multiple times in the same file we're trying to import. After we import passwords to the database, we can start cracking them with the attack_batch option.
For our password list, we're going to download the excellent WPA cracking wordlist hosted at the SecList GitHub repository. To download it to our Desktop, type the following commands into a terminal window.
Here, we can see that my rather old Lenovo can try about 1,157.3 PMKs per second, meaning it would take about 4.1 seconds to try every password in the file. Compare that to a new Macbook Pro with 4,226 PMKs per second, and you see how CPU power matters when it comes to cracking.
Now that we've captured the handshake and added the passwords to the database, we can run our attack_batch command we created before. Run the command pyrit -r pathtocapturefile -o savedpass attack_batch to try cracking handshakes we captured.
While we didn't go over everything Pyrit can do today, there is a lot we didn't cover. Of course, while Pyrit is one of the most potent brute-force attacks out there, an extremely strong password will still defeat the attack. Pyrit is capable of both dictionary and true brute-forcing attacks depending on what your system can handle, so make sure to pick strong passwords if you don't want to be vulnerable to easy cracking with tools like Pyrit.
I hope you enjoyed this guide to brute-forcing passwords using Pyrit! If you have any questions about this tutorial on using your CPU and GPU to crack passwords using Pyrit, please ask below, and if you have a comment or idea for a future episode, feel free to reach me on Twitter @KodyKinzie. 2ff7e9595c