Crack WPA/WPA2 Wi-Fi Routers with Airodump-ng and Aircrack-ng/Hashcat.
This is a brief walk-through tutorial that illustrates how to crack Wi-Fi networks that are secured using weak passwords. It is not exhaustive, but it should be enough information for you to test your own network's security or break into one nearby. The attack outlined below is entirely passive (listening only, nothing is broadcast from your computer) and it is impossible to detect provided that you don't actually use the password that you crack. An optional active deauthentication attack can be used to speed up the reconnaissance process and is described at the end of this document.
Here's how to crack a WPA or WPA2 password, step by step, with Reaver—and how to protect your network against Reaver attacks. In the first section of this post, I'll walk through the steps. How to easily hack a Wi-Fi network’s WPA/WPA2 handshake password so you can learn quickly and retain this information for the future. I will provide effective troubleshooting solutions for issues/bugs surrounding external WiFi adapters and the common problems that prevent you from cracking a WiFi’s password.
If you are familiar with this process, you can skip the descriptions and jump to a list of the commands used at the bottom. For a variety of suggestions and alternative methods, see the appendix. neal1991 and tiiime have also graciously provided translations to this document and the appendix in Chinese if you prefer those versions.
DISCLAIMER: This software/tutorial is for educational purposes only. It should not be used for illegal activity. The author is not responsible for its use. Don't be a dick.
Getting Started
This tutorial assumes that you:
- Have a general comfortability using the command-line
- Are running a debian-based linux distro, preferably Kali linux (OSX users see the appendix)
- Have Aircrack-ng installed
sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng
- Have a wireless card that supports monitor mode (see here for a list of supported devices)
Cracking a Wi-Fi Network
Monitor Mode
Begin by listing wireless interfaces that support monitor mode with:
If you do not see an interface listed then your wireless card does not support monitor mode
We will assume your wireless interface name is wlan0 but be sure to use the correct name if it differs from this. Next, we will place the interface into monitor mode:
Run iwconfig. You should now see a new monitor mode interface listed (likely mon0 or wlan0mon).
Find Your Target
Start listening to 802.11 Beacon frames broadcast by nearby wireless routers using your monitor interface:
You should see output similar to what is below.
For the purposes of this demo, we will choose to crack the password of my network, 'hackme'. Remember the BSSID MAC address and channel (CH) number as displayed by airodump-ng, as we will need them both for the next step.
Capture a 4-way Handshake
WPA/WPA2 uses a 4-way handshake to authenticate devices to the network. You don't have to know anything about what that means, but you do have to capture one of these handshakes in order to crack the network password. These handshakes occur whenever a device connects to the network, for instance, when your neighbor returns home from work. We capture this handshake by directing airmon-ng to monitor traffic on the target network using the channel and bssid values discovered from the previous command.
Now we wait... Once you've captured a handshake, you should see something like [ WPA handshake: bc:d3:c9:ef:d2:67 at the top right of the screen, just right of the current time.
Crack Wpa2 Beini Wifi Download
If you are feeling impatient, and are comfortable using an active attack, you can force devices connected to the target network to reconnect, be sending malicious deauthentication packets at them. This often results in the capture of a 4-way handshake. See the deauth attack section below for info on this.
Once you've captured a handshake, press ctrl-c to quit airodump-ng. You should see a .cap file wherever you told airodump-ng to save the capture (likely called -01.cap). We will use this capture file to crack the network password. I like to rename this file to reflect the network name we are trying to crack:
Crack the Network Password
The final step is to crack the password using the captured handshake. If you have access to a GPU, I highly recommend using hashcat for password cracking. I've created a simple tool that makes hashcat super easy to use called naive-hashcat. If you don't have access to a GPU, there are various online GPU cracking services that you can use, like GPUHASH.me or OnlineHashCrack. You can also try your hand at CPU cracking with Aircrack-ng.
Note that both attack methods below assume a relatively weak user generated password. Most WPA/WPA2 routers come with strong 12 character random passwords that many users (rightly) leave unchanged. If you are attempting to crack one of these passwords, I recommend using the Probable-Wordlists WPA-length dictionary files.
Cracking With naive-hashcat (recommended)
Before we can crack the password using naive-hashcat, we need to convert our .cap file to the equivalent hashcat file format .hccapx. You can do this easily by either uploading the .cap file to https://hashcat.net/cap2hccapx/ or using the cap2hccapx tool directly.
Next, download and run naive-hashcat:
Naive-hashcat uses various dictionary, rule, combination, and mask (smart brute-force) attacks and it can take days or even months to run against mid-strength passwords. The cracked password will be saved to hackme.pot, so check this file periodically. Once you've cracked the password, you should see something like this as the contents of your POT_FILE:
How To Crack Wpa2 Password
Where the last two fields separated by : are the network name and password respectively.
Crack Wifi Password Wpa2
If you would like to use hashcat without naive-hashcat see this page for info.
Cracking With Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng can be used for very basic dictionary attacks running on your CPU. Before you run the attack you need a wordlist. I recommend using the infamous rockyou dictionary file:
Note, that if the network password is not in the wordfile you will not crack the password.
If the password is cracked you will see a KEY FOUND! message in the terminal followed by the plain text version of the network password.
Deauth Attack
A deauth attack sends forged deauthentication packets from your machine to a client connected to the network you are trying to crack. These packets include fake 'sender' addresses that make them appear to the client as if they were sent from the access point themselves. Upon receipt of such packets, most clients disconnect from the network and immediately reconnect, providing you with a 4-way handshake if you are listening with airodump-ng.
Use airodump-ng to monitor a specific access point (using -c channel --bssid MAC) until you see a client (STATION) connected. A connected client look something like this, where is 64:BC:0C:48:97:F7 the client MAC.
Now, leave airodump-ng running and open a new terminal. We will use the aireplay-ng command to send fake deauth packets to our victim client, forcing it to reconnect to the network and hopefully grabbing a handshake in the process.
You can optionally broadcast deauth packets to all connected clients with:
Once you've sent the deauth packets, head back over to your airodump-ng process, and with any luck you should now see something like this at the top right: [ WPA handshake: 9C:5C:8E:C9:AB:C0. Now that you've captured a handshake you should be ready to crack the network password.
List of Commands
Below is a list of all of the commands needed to crack a WPA/WPA2 network, in order, with minimal explanation.
Appendix
The response to this tutorial was so great that I've added suggestions and additional material from community members as an appendix. Check it out to learn how to:
- Capture handshakes and crack WPA passwords on MacOS/OSX
- Capture handshakes from every network around you with
wlandump-ng - Use
crunchto generate 100+GB wordlists on-the-fly - Spoof your MAC address with
macchanger
How To Crack Wpa2
A Chinese version of the appendix is also available.
Crack Wpa2 Beini Wifi Windows 7
Attribution
Wpa Wpa2 Beini
Much of the information presented here was gleaned from Lewis Encarnacion's awesome tutorial. Thanks also to the awesome authors and maintainers who work on Aircrack-ng and Hashcat.
Overwhelming thanks to neal1991 and tiiime for translating this tutorial into Chinese. Further shout outs to yizhiheng, hiteshnayak305, enilfodne, DrinkMoreCodeMore, hivie7510, cprogrammer1994, 0XE4, hartzell, zeeshanu, flennic, bhusang, tversteeg, gpetrousov, crowchirp and Shark0der who also provided suggestions and typo fixes on Reddit and GitHub. If you are interested in hearing some proposed alternatives to WPA2, check out some of the great discussion on this Hacker News post.