Cracking WPA on the Cloud in Minutes

Its not new to see weakness in the protocols used for securing wireless networks.  Initially it was WEP (Wireless Equivalent Privacy) which got broken completely. Hackers were able to crack the wireless authentication key in few minutes, if not in seconds. To overcome this,  new protocols such as WPA (Wireless Protected Access), WPA2 has been introduced.
WPA supports many type of authentication methods, one of them is PSK (Pre Shared Key) technique, which is vulnerable to brute force attack. Though smaller dictionary based PSK can be cracked quickly,  it takes days or weeks together to crack longer ones.
But thanks to the cloud computing technology, now these WPA-PSK passwords can be cracked in few minutes. This service nick named as ‘Cloud-Cracking’ is now provided online by WPACracker which showcases the WPA-PSK cracking service at rapid rate for reasonable price of 17$.  WPACracker has got cloud cluster powered by 400 CPU’s with 135 million word dictionary created specifically for WPA passwords.

In order to crack WPA-PSK passwords one has to just collect the network trace during wireless authentication as described in this beautiful aircrack-ng tutorial.  Then this network trace file can be submitted to WPACracker for recovering the password.

This is going to make the life of pentester’s easier as they don’t have to wait for days together to show what they have got.