WPA/WPA2 Wireless Password Cracking

For almost 20 years, wireless communications, most commonly in the form of Wi-Fi, have become an indispensable part of the mobile workforce. While application layer protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) can be used to protect many of these communications, some transmissions over Wi-Fi are unencrypted. We can use protocols such as Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) to help protect these communications over the wireless layer only (this encryption is stripped away when the communications are no longer wireless). Unfortunately, the implementation of WPA and WPA2 does leave the possibility of cracking available to us. In this case, we can obtain one of the keys utilized to derive the encryption keys used to protect traffic. If this key can be obtained, the WPA/WPA2 network can be accessed (joined) directly, or communications between other devices on the network can be decrypted.

...