Speeding up WPA/WPA2 PSK cracking

As we have already seen in the previous section, if we have the correct passphrase in our dictionary, cracking WPA-Personal will work every time like a charm. So, why don't we just create a large elaborate dictionary of millions of common passwords and phrases people use? This would help us a lot and most of the time, we would end up cracking the passphrase. It all sounds great but we are missing one key component here—the time taken. One of the more CPU and time-consuming calculations is that of the PSK using the PSK passphrase and the SSID through the PBKDF2. This function hashes the combination of both over 4,096 times before outputting the 256-bit PSK. The next step in cracking involves using this key along with parameters in the four-way handshake and verifying against the MIC in the handshake. This step is computationally inexpensive. Also, the parameters will vary in the handshake every time and hence, this step cannot be precomputed. Thus, to speed...