aircrack-ng

Overview

aircrack-ng suite covers 802.11 monitoring, capture, and WEP/WPA/WPA2-PSK cracking. Components: airmon-ng, airodump-ng, aireplay-ng, aircrack-ng, airdecap-ng.

WPA crack requires 4-way handshake or PMKID capture. GPU acceleration via hashcat (mode 22000) often replaces aircrack-ng for speed.

Primary use cases

Wireless passphrase audit on authorized lab APs
Handshake capture for offline cracking
WEP crack demonstrations (legacy)

Key commands

Monitor mode

airmon-ng start wlan0
airodump-ng wlan0mon -w capture --channel 6

Crack WPA handshake

aircrack-ng -w wordlist.txt capture-01.cap

Related tools

Hashcat — GPU password recovery. Rule and mask attacks across hundreds of hash formats.

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