Learn Ethical Hacking from Scratch

Handshake theory

In the previous section, we saw how we can use the WPS feature in routers to crack the WPA key. This process is guaranteed to work on every WPS-enabled network; therefore, if your target uses WPA or WPA2 encryption and has WPS enabled, that should be the first method you try to crack the password with. If WPS is not enabled, however, we have to crack the actual WPA key. As we explained in the section on WPS cracking, in WPA, each packet is encrypted using a unique, temporary key, it's not like WEP, where IVs are repeated and we collect a large number of data packets with the same IVs. In each WPA packet, there is a temporary unique IV, even if we collect one million packets, these packets will not be useful for us—they do ...