WPA cracking with the GPU

The GPUs of recent video cards usually comprise a large number of cores that can execute threads concurrently, resulting in faster performing of complex calculations than a CPU.

To be suitable for general purpose computing (GPGPU), the GPU must support the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) or the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) platforms, which allow normal programs to access and take advantage of the hardware of the GPU when executing specified portions of code.

The two most popular programs included in Kali Linux that make use of the GPU to crack passwords are Pyrit and oclHashcat.

Note

Getting ready for GPU cracking

First of all, it is worth specifying that GPU-based cracking tools don't work in a virtual machine, as they need direct access to the physical video card. So, we need to run them in a native installation of Kali Linux.

To do GPU cracking, we first need to check that the proper drivers for our video card are installed. We must install...