We all know we can use aircrack-ng to run a wordlist attack to crack WPA/WPA2, in this article I’m going to show you how to do the same using a tool called HashCat, and compare its speed with aircrack-ng.

The advantage of using HashCat is unlike aircrack-ng which uses the CPU to crack the key, HashCat uses the GPU, this makes the cracking process MUCH faster (results below).

Installing & using Hashcat

1. First you need to download Hashcat from https://hashcat.net/hashcat/
2. Navigate to the location where you downloaded it, and unzip it, personally I like to use 7zip.
3. Open the Command Prompt (go to windows search and type cmd).
4. Navigate to your Hashcat folder where it’s unzipped.
5. Type hashcat32.exe or hashcat64.exe depending on the architecture of your CPU.
6. In order to use the GPU, you need to get its id using the following command

hashcat64.exe -I

mine is #3. Then you need to use the hash type which is 2500 for WPA, I do recommend using

hashcat64.exe --help

to get familiar with the tool.

To specify device use the -d argument and the number of your GPU.
The command should look like this in end

hashcat64.exe -m 2500 -d 3 [handshake_file] example: Handshake.hccapx" [worldlist file] "example :eightdigit.txt

Example:

hashcat64.exe -m 2500 -d 3 Handshake.hccapx eightdigit.txt

Where Handshake.hccapx is my handshake file, and eithdigit.txt is my wordlist, you need to convert cap file to hccapx using https://hashcat.net/cap2hccapx/

Results:

Test1: Using HashCat, with Asus GTX 1080 OC edition which has GPU Boost Clock with 1936 MHz, total GB ram of 8 Gigabytes, and Cuda cores 2560.
CUDA = Computing performance Boost Clock = Increases the Clock speed.

Hashcat took 4 mins, 45 secs to reach the end of the wordlist and crack the handshake with  a wordlist of 100,000,000 passwords.

Test 2: Using Aircrack-ng on Kali installed as main operating system with is i7-7700k CPU –  base clock of 4.20, turbo clock 4.50Ghz with 4 cores and 8 threads, it would take 4 hours 22 minutes 14 seconds try all the passwords in the wordlist.

Test 3: Kali installed as a virtual machine, in this case it would take 11 hours, 31 minutes and 40 seconds to try all passwords in the wordlist!

Resources:

• Hashcat Official Website.
• Cap to hccapx converter.