Introduction

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

• First, you need to download Hashcat from https://hashcat.net/hashcat/

• Navigate to the location where you downloaded it, and unzip it, personally I like to use 7zip.

• Open the Command Prompt (go to windows search and type cmd).

• Navigate to your Hashcat folder where it's unzipped.

• Type hashcat32.exe or hashcat64.exe depending on the architecture of your CPU.

• 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