Hashcat

It is a versatile password cracking tool that was primary developed to operate on systems with Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel

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Device Properties

The command below displays the specification of our system's installed devices and indicates OpenCL is setup properly:

hashcat -I

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Hashcat Benchmark

Using hashcat with the -b starts in benchmark mode and starts testing each module speed, hashcat supports over 300 hashing functions up to today, so this test will take so much time alone, for this you need to specify the module number that can be found either in the help page of the tool or the documentation

hashcat -b -m <module number>

For this section we are interested in WPA, specifically WPA-EAPOL-PBKDF2, to do so use the command below to search all the hash modes that contain WPA in them:

hashcat --help | grep WPA

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Hashcat utilities

Hashcat provides utilities that are useful for password cracking, they are not installed by default, but they are available via hashcat-utils package which is located in /usr/lib/hashcat-utils , one of its tools is cap2hccapx.bin which exports WPA handshakes from .pcap files to HCCAPx, a format that is used by hashcat for WPA/WPA2 handshakes

How to convert into HCCAPx?

/usr/lib/hashcat-utils/cap2hccapx <Capture file> <output filename>

Aircrack-ng also can use HCCAPx format for cracking

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Passphrase Cracking

So simple and easy just specify the hash mode, input hash, and wordlist, check the command below (we used 2500 to crack WPA-EAPOL-PBKDF2) :

hashcat -m 2500 <hash file> <wordlist>