Methods for cracking WPA/WPA2 passphrases
While John can perform WPA/WPA2 PSK cracking, we will focus in this chapter on cracking these PSKs with hashcat. First, we need a packet capture with either the PMKID or the 4-way handshake. However, we cannot pass the packet capture file directly to hashcat; we need to convert it into a format that hashcat expects. While this capability is not natively included with hashcat, we can use add-on utilities to achieve this objective, such as the terrific hcxtools from ZerBea, available at https://github.com/ZerBea/hcxtools. Installation is relatively simple; clone the repo followed by make and sudo make install. Once installed, we will use the hcxpcapngtool utility to convert the pcap file, using a syntax like this:
hcxpcapngtool -o <output file name> <pcap to convert>
In this case, we can call the output file whatever we want – as long as we call it by the same name when we run hashcat in a minute. Now, we can take a look...
