Cracking Wifi WPA/WPA2 passwords using pyrit cowpatty in Kali Linux

Cracking Process

We can crack using few different process.

1. Using Pyrit
2. Using Cowpatty

Attack a handshake with PMKs from the db using Pyrit

Simple. Just use the following command to start the cracking process.

pyrit -r hs/BigPond_58-98-35-E9-2B-8D.cap attack_db

That’s it. It will take few minutes to go through the whole Database Table to get the password if it existed in the Dictionary. As you can see, 159159186.00 PMK‘s per second was the speed and it took less than 1 second to crack it. This is by far the fastest. I also had to blank out much of the screenshot.

Note: I tried it from a different workstation with a NVIDIA GTX460 Graphics card with CUDA and Cpyrit-CUDA installed. Obviously, this was much faster than my Laptop. But either way, this is super fast.

Attack a handshake with passwords from a file or Dictionary using Pyrit

If you don’t want to create Datbase and crunch through Dictionary file directly (much slower), following is what you can do:

pyrit -r hs/BigPond_58-98-35-E9-2B-8D.cap -i /root/wpa.lst attack_passthrough

Speed this way? 7807 PMKs per second. Much slower for my taste.

Crack using Cowpatty

To crack using cowpatty, you need to export in cowpatty format and then start the cracking process.

Export to cowpatty

I hope up to this point, everything went as planned and worked out. From Pyrit, we can push our output to either cowpatty or airolib-ng. All my tests shows that cowpatty is a lot more faster, so I’ll stick with that.

So let’s make our cowpatty file. This is again simple, issue the following command to export your output to cowpatty.

pyrit -e BigPond -o cow.out export_cowpatty

Let it rip: Crack WPA WPA2 PSK password using cowpatty

Now that we have our cowpatty output, let’s try to crack WPA2/PSK passphrase. Issue the following command to start the cracking process.

cowpatty -d cow.out -s BigPond -r hs/BigPond_58-98-35-E9-2B-8D.cap

Once you type it in, you’ll a bunch of passwords being tried against your hash file. This will keep going until the end of the file. Once a matching password is found in the dictionary file, the cracking process will stop with an output containing the password.

And bingo, it found a matching password. Look at the number of passwords tried in a seconds 164823.00 passphrases/second.

NOTE: cowpatty will fail if your password/dictionary file is larger than 2GB. You’ll have to stick to airolib-ng even though that’s slower.