For Lab 7, we’re crack the WPA/WPA2 wireless network key using oclHashcat on Windows. Instead of using CPU power to brute force the password were going to use the GPUs, short for Graphics Processing Unit. The benefit of using the GPU instead of the CPU for brute forcing is the huge increase in cracking speed. A GPU is designed to perform repetitive tasks very fast because it has many more cores than a CPU that can be used to process tasks in parallel. Because of the number of cores in a GPU even an older GPU can outperform a modern CPU by using heavy parallelism. The difference between older and newer graphics cards and GPUs is even larger. The older Radeon 7670M video card in a 2012 laptop does an average of 20kh (20.000 attempts) per second where an AMD HD7970 videocard can do 142kh (142.000 attempts) per second and 8 x NVidea Titan X cards can do 2.233 kh per second. This makes brute forcing routers with easy default passwords, like the TP-LINK (default WPS PIN) or the standard UPC broadband routers (8 capital letters), a piece of cake and just a matter of time. In the first part of the tutorial we created 26 different wordlists which allows us to distribute the wordlist over multiple PCs with multiple GPUs. Of course you can and have to question the cost effectiveness of this setup to crack a password because GPUs dont come cheap and require massive amounts of power when performing at top speed. Nevertheless it gives us a good understanding of what passwords are strong and what passwords arent when using GPUs to brute force them.  Here’s some vids to help.

https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=oclhashcat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hoGVUAo7xA&feature=youtu.be

https://youtu.be/WFncxKlmw2A

As with the previous assignment, use screenshots to describe your process.