Wifi Password Hacker App
Leah Wibberley
In this blog, I demonstrate how easily (you do not need a cracking rig) and with little equipment unsecure WiFi passwords can be cracked, thus hacking the WiFi network .At the end, we will reveal statistics of the cracked hashes and explain how to defend your network from this type of attack. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we know and understand the cracking method to form an adequate defense.
In simple English, if an adversary wanted to hack/crack a WiFi password, they need to be in the right place (between users and a router) at the right time (when users log in) and be lucky (users entered the correct password and all four packets were sniffed correctly).
Cracking the PMKID hash is ultimately just generating/calculating PMKs with the SSID and different passphrases, then calculating PMKID from the PMK and the other information we obtained. Once we generated a PMKID equal to the PMKID that was retrieved from the AP (Figure 3), the hash is cracked; the passphrases that were used to generate the right PMK that the PMKID was generated from is the correct WiFi password.
Each digit has 10 options (0-9), hence 10**8 possible combinations. One hundred million seems like a lot of combinations, but our monster rig calculates at the speed of 6819.8 kH/s which translates into 6,819,000 hashes per second.
A cracking rig is not required as my laptop can get to 194.4 kH/s, which translates into 194,000 hashes per second. That equals more than enough computing power to cycle through the possibilities necessary to crack the passwords. Consequently, it took my laptop roughly 9 minutes to break a single WiFi password with the characteristics of a cellphone number. (10**8)/194,000 = 516 (seconds)/60 = 9 minutes.
The cracking speed for hashtypes differs because of different hash functions and the number of iterations. For example, PMKID is very slow compared to MD5 or NTLM. Nonetheless, it is feasible to crack a PMKID hash if the attacker focuses on a specific network, and the password is not complicated enough.
I hope you enjoyed this blog and that you will take the required steps to secure your WiFi network. And as a reminder, none of the passwords we cracked were used for unauthorized access to these WiFi networks or any other information accessible via these networks.
Wireless hacking tools are designed to help secure and attack these wireless networks. Some are designed to help gain access to the network password and the network itself. Others provide information about the structure and traffic flowing over the network, informing later attacks.
Two types of vulnerabilities can be found in the Wireless LAN. One is poor configuration and the other is poor encryption. Poor configuration is caused by the network admin who manages the network. It may include a weak password, a lack of security settings, use of default configurations and other user-related issues.
To get unauthorized access to a network, one needs to crack these security protocols. Many tools can crack Wi-Fi encryption. These tools can either take advantage of WEP weaknesses or use brute force password guessing attacks on WPA/WPA2/WPA3.
Wireless hacking tools are of two types. One can be used to sniff the network and monitor what is happening in the network. The other kind of tool is used to hack WEP/WPA keys. These are the popular tools used for wireless password cracking and network troubleshooting.
Aircrack-ng is one of the most popular wireless password cracking tools that you can use for 802.11a/b/g WEP and WPA cracking. Aircrack-ng uses the best algorithms to recover wireless passwords by capturing packets. Once enough packets have been gathered, it tries to recover the password. To make the attack faster, it implements a standard FMS attack with some optimizations.
The company behind the tool also offers an online tutorial where you can learn how to install and use this tool to crack wireless passwords. It comes as Linux distribution, Live CD and VMware image options. You can use any of these. It supports most of the wireless adapters and is almost guaranteed to work. If you are using a Linux distribution, the only drawback of the tool is that it requires deeper knowledge of Linux. If you are not comfortable with Linux, you will find it hard to use this tool. In this case, try Live CD or VMWare image. VMWare Image needs less knowledge, but it only works with a limited set of host OS, and only USB devices are supported.
However, CoWPAtty does have a rainbow table designed to mitigate this issue. Since many routers have common SSIDs, pre-computed tables have been generated for these SSIDs and common passwords. If the target network is one of these, testing it against the precomputed dictionary is much faster.
CloudCracker is an online password cracking tool for cracking WPA-protected Wi-Fi networks. This tool can also be used to crack different password hashes. Just upload the handshake file, enter the network name, and start the tool. This tool has a huge dictionary of around 300 million words to perform attacks.
Last week's feature explaining why passwords are under assault like never before touched a nerve with many Ars readers, and with good reason. After all, passwords are the keys that secure Web-based bank accounts, sensitive e-mail services, and virtually every other facet of our online life. Lose control of the wrong password and it may only be a matter of time until the rest of our digital assets fall, too.
Take, for example, the hundreds of millions of WiFi networks in use all over the world. If they're like the ones within range of my office, most of them are protected by the WiFi Protected Access or WiFi Protected Access 2 security protocols. In theory, these protections prevent hackers and other unauthorized people from accessing wireless networks or even viewing traffic sent over them, but only when end users choose strong passwords. I was curious how easy it would be to crack these passcodes using the advanced hardware menus and techniques that have become readily available over the past five years. What I found wasn't encouraging.
First, the good news. WPA and WPA2 use an extremely robust password-storage regimen that significantly slows the speed of automated cracking programs. By using the PBKDF2 key derivation function along with 4,096 iterations of SHA1 cryptographic hashing algorithm, attacks that took minutes to run against the recent LinkedIn and eHarmony password dumps of June would require days or even weeks or months to complete against the WiFi encryption scheme.
What's more, WPA and WPA2 passwords require a minimum of eight characters, eliminating the possibility that users will pick shorter passphrases that could be brute forced in more manageable timeframes. WPA and WPA2 also use a network's SSID as salt, ensuring that hackers can't effectively use precomputed tables to crack the code.
I started this project by setting up two networks with hopelessly insecure passphrases. The first step was capturing what is known as the four-way handshake, which is the cryptographic process a computer uses to validate itself to a wireless access point and vice versa. This handshake takes place behind a cryptographic veil that can't be pierced. But there's nothing stopping a hacker from capturing the packets that are transmitted during the process and then seeing if a given password will complete the transaction. With less than two hours practice, I was able to do just that and crack the dummy passwords "secretpassword" and "tobeornottobe" I had chosen to protect my test networks.
I then uploaded the pcap files to CloudCracker, a software-as-a-service website that charges $17 to check a WiFi password against about 604 million possible words. Within seconds both "secretpassword" and "tobeornottobe" were cracked. A special WPA mode built-in to the freely available oclHashcat Plus password cracker retrieved the passcodes with similar ease.
Cracking such passcodes I had set up in advance to be guessed was great for demonstration purposes, but it didn't provide much satisfaction. What I really wanted to know was how much luck I'd have cracking a password that was actually being used to secure one of the networks in the vicinity of my office.
So I got the permission of one of my office neighbors to crack his WiFi password. To his chagrin, it took CloudCracker just 89 minutes to crack the 10-character, all-numerical password he used, although because the passcode wasn't contained in the entry-level, 604 million-word list, I relied on a premium, 1.2 billion-word dictionary that costs $34 to use.
My fourth hack target presented itself when another one of my neighbors was selling the above-mentioned Netgear router during a recent sidewalk sale. When I plugged it in, I discovered that he had left the eight-character WiFi password intact in the firmware. Remarkably, neither CloudCracker nor 12 hours of heavy-duty crunching by Hashcat were able to crack the passphrase. The secret: a lower-case letter, followed two numbers, followed by five more lower-case letters. There was no discernible pattern to this password. It didn't spell any word either forwards or backwards. I asked the neighbor where he came up with the password. He said it was chosen years ago using an automatic generation feature offered by EarthLink, his ISP at the time. The e-mail address is long gone, the neighbor told me, but the password lives on.
No doubt, this neighbor should have changed his password long ago, but there is a lot to admire about his security hygiene nonetheless. By resisting the temptation to use a human-readable word, he evaded a fair amount of cutting-edge resources devoted to discovering his passcode. Since the code isn't likely to be included in any password cracking word lists, the only way to crack it would be to attempt every eight-character combination of letters and numbers. Such brute-force attacks are possible, but in the best of worlds they require at least six days to exhaust all the possibilities when using Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. WPA's use of a highly iterated implementation of the PBKDF2 function makes such cracks even harder.
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